Wildcat Wine (25 page)

“It's for an environmentalist. You know how they hate to waste paper. Trees and stuff, you know.”

“Well, if you change your mind, I have a good collection of wrapping paper. I'll show you how to do it up really nice.”

Grandmom's constructive criticism aside, the cool rooms of her house opened to me like a safe inner sanctum, and I listened for a half hour to her theories of child rearing while playing with Redfish and declining offers of food.

But my mind raced with the questions of who had put the bullets in my credenza and why Tired Rufus Johnson was armed with a search warrant for the Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley law firm.

Okay, I was officially paranoid now.

That night, Philip rang my doorbell as I was trying to cajole Bearess into eating some stir-fried okra.

“You left several messages,” he said. “I hope you do not object to this impromptu visit.”

“Come on in.” I led him to the kitchen, where he and Bearess took remarkably the same attitude toward the okra, so I poured Philip some of Earl's wine, split my salad with him, poured Bearess some dog food, and sat down to eat my okra.

While Philip was giving me a rundown of his day, I waited for the most dramatic moment to tell him about my day's events. If there was a competition going here, I knew I'd win with the box of 158-grain roundnoses. But then the doorbell rang again.

Philip hovered protectively as I opened the door to the junior law clerk. “How'd you get my address?” I demanded.

“Er, the, eh, Edith gave it to me. I told her you said this was important.”

Not as important as having a chat tomorrow with Ms. Too-Free-with-Her-Information about never giving out my phone number or address to anyone, ever, no matter what. Okay, maybe she could give it out to Lenny Kravitz. But office-manager jackal or not, Edith needed to be reminded of my privacy rights.

But back on track, I asked, “Did you find Mike Daniels in Kenneth's appointment book?”

“Eh, um, no.”

“Stop stuttering. Then why are you here?”

“I, er . . . um, found that . . .”

I noticed that the young man was sweating profusely. Okay, he couldn't talk without an
um
every breath, he didn't respect privacy, and he sweated too much. Unless his father was a Supreme Court justice, this boy's future was not bright.

“What?” I snapped.

He flushed and sweated and ummed. Finally Philip introduced himself and asked the clerk if he would like to come in and share a glass of wine.

The boy stepped inside. “I, um, didn't find Daniels's name.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“But, um, I did find, um, that two pages were torn out of his, um, appointment book.”

“What dates?”

He told me with a maximum of five more ums, and left, never having partaken of the proffered wine.

“You scared that young man,” Philip said. “Did you know that?”

“Don't be silly.”

“You should be nicer to people.”

“Yeah, and not say
crap,
got it, short man.”

“You should be nicer to me,” he said. “And I'm not short, you are just exceptionally tall.”

I looked at Philip until I saw that I was making him nervous. As I studied him, I tried to separate my need for his professional services from any personal desires I might have for him. When I'd first met him, I had been so smitten I couldn't form sentences. But now, well, now I wasn't so sure.

Leaning into Philip, I kissed him, thinking physical contact might answer that question in a way staring at him had not.

It was a good kiss, Philip was right there, and right into it. His hands stayed the hands of a gentleman, but his body pressed against me in a decidedly roguish manner.

“I am hoping we might make love now,” he said, taking a break from the kiss.

“I was hoping we might go back to Smith, O'Leary, and Stanley and see if we can find any time sheets in Cristal's stuff that would explain where Kenneth was on those two days he tore out of his appointment book. Plus, there's some stuff I need to tell you about.”

Philip sighed. “I'll drive,” he said.

On the ride over, I brought Philip up to date with my day's discoveries. We played endlessly with the question of who could have the bullets
and
access to my office. The only people who could have the bullets were Benny if he'd kept the gun and bullets, Bonita if she'd taken them from Benny, Waylon if he'd ended up with the backpack with the gun and bullets, Dave if he'd recovered them from Benny or Waylon. Of that list, only Bonita had access to my office.

But Bonita had looked as surprised as I was when we'd discovered the bullets in place of the laptop.

Besides, Bonita would never, not in a million years, plant those bullets in my credenza.

I said this to Philip over and over, applying the trial-attorney rule that a statement repeated frequently enough takes on the tone of truth.

“Are you sure?” Philip the doubter asked. “Wouldn't she do it to protect Benny?”

“No,” I said. But I wasn't sure. In a tight corner, if Bonita had to choose between me and Benny, then obviously Benny would win. And I wouldn't blame Bonita in the least for that. But Bonita was too smart to get herself into that kind of trap.

Wasn't she?

After we talked Bonita-and-bullets scenarios to death, we arrived at no particular conclusions about who was killing whom, or why. But at the office, after grumping around in Cristal's files, we discovered modest pay dirt. In Kenneth's travel-reimbursement folder, we found copies of forms showing that Kenneth had filed mileage-reimbursement requests for a round-trip to Oneco for client conferences on both of the dates he had torn from his appointment book. The form was blank where a client's name should have been.

But, hey, since Mad lived in Oneco, it was too much to be a coincidence.

Before we left Cristal's files, I did a free-association snoop and cruised through her personal files—Visa bills and such. For a legal secretary, she had pretty expensive tastes, especially in clothes. She had her receipts in perfect chronological order—Saks at Southgate, St. Armand's Key, Winter Park, another Winter Park, Saks, St. Armand's, et cetera, et cetera, all true shopping Meccas for the rich. This made me think she had a rich man out there somewhere. The gossip from the Sisterhood of the Secretaries had never caught Cristal dating anyone. Hmm, a rich man, especially a rich, married man, would explain her secretiveness. When I started pursuing copies of her health-insurance claims, Philip suggested I was being a bit rude. So I quit.

On the way home, Philip made concerned noises about what to do with the wrapped box of bullets. Weighing the alternatives, I opted for leaving the box exactly where it was.

Bullets aside, back at my house an ardent Philip made me promise to forget everything except him, assuring me we'd work on the case tomorrow. We drank Earl's wine and we made out a bit self-consciously on the couch. But all the time my mind whirled around the possibility that Mad's death had set in play a chain of events apparently destined to end with me being framed for Kenneth's murder.

Eventually Philip accepted that tonight wasn't going to be his night for making love and left.

I finished the bottle of wine, did sit-ups and push-ups, glared at the clock, and wondered if I could make myself wait until a decent time in the morning to track Kenneth's mileage-reimbursement request back to Mad.

Wine and weariness aside, I had about convinced myself to drive to Oneco when Bearess raised her big head and growled at the door.

When I peeked through the peephole, I saw Tired, holding Redfish.

“I was picking him up from your neighbor lady,” Tired said. “She's a really fine woman, you know. She speaks highly of you. I know it's late, ma'am, but I saw your lights on and wanted to see how you were doing. Rough morning and all.”

“Come in,” I said. “I'm fine.”

Tired lumbered in, weighed down with Redfish.

“Find anything with the warrant? At the law firm today?”

“No, ma'am. Nothing but a bunch of nervous lawyers with piles of paper.”

“What were you looking for?” I didn't really expect an answer.

“Had a tip from one of Kenneth's clients that he was heavy into cocaine. I sort of pushed that to a law-and-order-type judge for a warrant to check out the whole firm.”

My word, I thought, how well my plan of defaming Kenneth as a cokehead seemed to be working now that it didn't matter in the least.

“Follow me,” I said, “and I'll pour us some wine.”

“Sounds fine, ma'am, but first I got a question for you.”

“Shoot,” I said, and then chastised myself for a bad word choice.

“That Jackson fella. He got any reason to kill Kenneth?”

“Jackson? No. Jackson's not a killer.” But I paused at that. Jackson the Vietnam veteran, Jackson the reincarnated Stonewall, Jackson the severely pissed off at Kenneth. Jackson caught over a barrel by Kenneth's demands for a huge bribe to not take his clients and leave the firm. But I said, “Not his own law partner.”

“But he sure didn't like Kenneth much, did he?”

“No. Nobody liked Kenneth much. But Jackson wouldn't bring all the complications down on the law firm that murdering a major partner causes. He's had to work triple time to reassure Kenneth's clients not to leave the firm.” What I really thought was that if Jackson had killed Kenneth, he wouldn't need six bullets. One through the heart would have done it.

“But you agree Jackson pretty much despised Kenneth?”

“Yes. We all pretty much despised Kenneth.”

“Why's that?”

With Tired trailing me, I went into my kitchen and pulled down a wineglass for him and a new one for me. And I pondered whether I had the energy to explain Kenneth to Tired.

When we sat back down in my living room, I took a sip of wine and said, “I'll give you an example. My first year at the law firm, Kenneth made me do a completely spurious appellate brief in a workers' compensation case where the claimant was in really bad shape. A fireman. The man had no family. Filing the appeal, even as ridiculous as Kenneth's argument was, stopped the payment of the fireman's comp benefits. Under the statute, as long as the employer contests the comp and there's any kind of court proceedings pending, the comp payments are put on hold.”

“Doesn't seem right,” Tired said.

“No. It isn't. It invites litigation for the purpose of delay. Which is what Kenneth was doing. While Kenneth and I dragged out the appeal, the man lost his home because he couldn't work and he couldn't get his comp checks. He ended up living in his car. Then he died, no workers' comp meant no health care, no income. Because he had no dependants, his comp claim died with him. Kenneth withdrew the appeal. He'd done what he set out to do—he'd delayed payment of the fireman's justly due compensation until the man had died, taking his claim with him. That saved the company a bundle and it's shoveled cases to Kenneth ever since.”

“You did that? You helped Kenneth do that?”

“I was too young and too green not to do what I was told. If I'd refused writing that brief, Kenneth would have fired me.” Yeah, okay, I know
now
that's no excuse. One of the reasons I never let men tell me what to do, that is, except Jackson, is the residual remorse I felt over the fireman I helped Kenneth kill by a perfectly legal use of the Florida Workers' Compensation statutes.

“Tired,” I said, wanting to redeem myself in his eyes, “I didn't fully understand and I didn't know how to refuse Kenneth, and I . . . I carry that guilt, all right? But when you were just starting out, there must've been something you did because a superior told you to do it.”

Long pause. Tired drank his wine, not sipping but almost gulping. I studied his face and saw that his eyes were guarded and sad. Yeah, Tired had done something bad too, back when he was a green recruit.

Then Redfish reached down and yanked Bearess's ears and the dog jumped up in Tired's lap and licked Redfish, who giggled fit to choke, while Bearess wagged her tail so hard the whole couch shook. Tired and I relaxed, laughing at how well our children were playing with each other.

Moments later, I thought how weird the world really was. If anybody had suggested to me the day that Officer T. R. Johnson had ripped up my okra plants that the same Officer T.R. and I would coast into a wary friendship, I would have laughed hard enough to spit.

But there he was, sitting on my couch in my living room, getting tipsy on poor dead Earl's wine, with a gurgling baby in his lap and a diaper bag on the floor and a wiggling dog pushing her head between us.

While I studied on how all this had come to be, Tired said, “Shame, really. Earl, he made a good wine and seemed a decent man.”