Writ of Execution (9 page)

So she had been hiding for fifteen months, a long time to maintain such a high level of emotional intensity.

“Mr. Potter never asked Dan anything about me. He knew I was Native, and he knew I was poor and came from the mainland but that’s all he knew. My aunt—she’s not really senile or anything, just confused sometimes— anyway, she arranged for me to work part-time at the Smoke Shop—you know, on the highway right outside Minden. . . .”

“Sure. I’ve stopped in there. Jewelry and souvenirs. I bought a beaded barrette there once.”

“And cheap cartons of cigarettes. The ranchers come from miles around. Anyway, I—I took the long way home from work on Sunday night. I was, well, you could say I was upset about my life, or you could say I was crawling out of my skin from never doing anything but hiding and working. I just wanted to forget everything.”

“All alone?”

“Yes. But as soon as I hit Tahoe I started feeling very anxious. This was the first time I’d been out in such a public place in months. I thought I saw Mr. Potter pulling up outside Prize’s. I panicked and went down the aisles and sat down at a dollar slot. The Greed Machine. I would have been dead broke in another five minutes.”

Nina put down her pen and transferred the portable phone to the other ear. Bob trotted down the hall to his room and a fingers-on-the-chalkboard scratching started up at the door.

“Well? What do you think?”

“It’s a hell of a story,” Nina said.

“And now this. Is it really true? Am I—that is, is it—”

“Well, I’ve got the check. I’d say you have quite a history ahead of you,” Nina said. She laughed.

“So—do you see why I was thinking that Paul might help me? He can go to Hawaii and prove I didn’t kill Dan. It’s the only way. I have to face Mr. Potter, but with some facts.”

Oh, sure, Nina thought, two people in a boat, no medical findings, nobody’s ever going to prove anything. But all she said was “I’ll call Paul. Ten A.M. tomorrow, okay?”

“Uh oh.”

“Problem?”

“Someone’s at the door! I think he may have peeked in the window a second ago.”

“Don’t answer,” Nina said.

“Okay, I’ll just sit here until he goes away.”

“Hello?” Nina could hear faintly over the phone. “Meter man.”

“It’s just the guy who reads the meters,” Jessie said.

“Saying it doesn’t make it so.”

“You’re right. I won’t answer, then.”

“I just need a signature,” Nina heard.

“He’s wearing a uniform and everything,” Jessie said. “I don’t want to cause any trouble for my auntie.”

“Ask him to slip whatever he wants signed under the door,” Nina said. She heard Jessie’s phone clank against something, then Jessie telling her visitor just that.

“Sure,” the voice said. “No problem. You’re Mrs. Potter, right?”

Suddenly Nina was afraid for Jessie. She had just heard a hair-raising story and now Jessie was standing in a line of fire talking to someone who might have a gun. “Jessie!” she yelled into the phone.

“Jessie!” No answer, but she didn’t hear anything alarming either. A few moments later Jessie got back on the line.

“He wasn’t a meter reader.”

“I was afraid of that. What was he?”

“I don’t know. They’re legal papers. There are numbers on the sides of each sheet, and a stamp on the one on top.” Jessie was silent, reading. Then she said, “I don’t understand. ‘Application for Entry of Judgment Based on Sister-State Judgment.’ What’s that mean?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“There’s a whole sheaf of papers. What could it be? My name’s on the front. It’s some kind of legal notice and they call me a Judgment Debtor.”

Bob came out with his backpack on his back. The neck of his new electric bass stuck out of it. It would probably fall into the road on the first bump. “Bye,” he announced. “Going to Nikki’s.”

“When will you be home?” Nina said, putting her hand over the phone.

“Before dark.”

“Home by dinner.”

“It’s summer!”

“You heard me.” She said to Jessie, “I think he was a process server, Jessie. This could be too important to wait until tomorrow.”

“I just can’t get up to your office today. Tomorrow is okay, but not today.”

“Then fax me the papers.”

“There are fifty pages at least. I don’t have a fax. I’d have to go to a Mailboxes Etc. somewhere. It would be expensive.”

“You can afford it. Go and fax me the papers. Here’s my fax number at the office.”

“Look. I can’t get away, okay?”

“Why not?”

Silence. Nina couldn’t shake the feeling that Jessie still hadn’t told her everything. “This is important,” she said. “How do you think he found you? I have to see those papers right away.”

“Okay. I’ll fax them.”

“Right away. Can you get into town by ten A.M. tomorrow morning?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And Jessie?”

“What?”

“When you come, bring Kenny’s gun.”

“Huh?”

“The gun. Paul told me it was taken from his pocket last night.”

“Oh, no. Who would know it was there? He must have dropped it.”

“You knew it was there.”

Jessie protested. She said she hadn’t touched the Glock, hadn’t even noticed Paul picking it up off Sandy’s desk. She asked a lot of questions herself. She seemed to be startled, seemed to have no idea what had happened to the gun.

Ominous.

Nina hung up and rubbed her sore shoulder. She couldn’t take the urgent scratching anymore. She let Hitchcock in. Let’s see, purse, briefcase, contact lens case—leave Bob a note—

Hitchcock divined her purpose instantly and ran to the door, casting urgent looks back.

“I have to go to work, boy,” she said. “Bob’ll take you out later.” She looked at Hitchcock and Hitchcock let her have it, his heart on display in his brown Raisinet eyes. He was still shedding his winter coat in July and as he wiggled his body and wagged his tail, hair floated off his coat and glistened in the sunlight as it fell to the floor.

“You stay,” she told him. He understood this and his grin drooped. The brightness faded from his eye.

But when she gave up and pulled on her running shoes, the dog forgave and forgot, prancing around her, nudging with his head.

“You’re a nag,” she said. “G’boy. G’boy. Okay, walk.” She had uttered the magic word and his whole body thrilled with it. “A short walk,” she said. “No! Don’t slobber!” They went outside. She wrestled the dog onto his leash and walked up Kulow Street toward the Jicarilla Meadow. It was about eighty degrees. The forest of pines was all around her, the one her cabin sheltered in, and she looked at the trees gratefully. She knew she was safe for the first time in a long time, and she only wished Jessie Potter could feel the same way.

Jessie’s refuge had turned public. Where a process server had gone, others would follow. What was in those legal papers?

9

NINA SAT WITH her bare feet up on the desk, dictating a will for a young man with leukemia. Her watch, a thin-banded Gucci that her mother had worn, told her that it was four-thirty in the afternoon. It was still Monday. Time had stretched thin and long over the last couple of days.

The fax machine, stocked with a new roll of paper, hadn’t shuddered under the opening salvo of whatever pirates were after Jessie’s win yet. Nina had been checking it every ten minutes.

Sandy was filing a complaint at the County Clerk’s office on Johnson Boulevard, trying to beat a five o’clock deadline, and the town seemed to be in the grip of a midsummer afternoon snooze.

She put her notes down and stretched her arms behind her head, looking around. She had moved in two years before, after being downsized from a respectable appellate-law job in San Francisco. Her office might be just a modest suite on the first floor of a two-story redwood building on the highway, but it was her modest suite, where she was the boss. It consisted of Sandy’s office where clients waited, the inner office where she was now sitting with its big windows with their views of Mt. Tallac, a sliver of the lake, and the boulevard, and the conference-room-slash-library.

The suite had one major problem. Sandy constituted the only boundary between Nina and whoever came through the outer door. If she was down the street at lunch or in the conference room, Nina had to leave the inner office door open a crack in case someone came into the reception area. Now and then the visitors were disgruntled, unwilling to wait, or spooky. The office needed a partition with one of those glass windows that slide open. Maybe next January, the only time of year when no business was conducted at Tahoe, because everybody was out of money and too tired to quarrel. Meantime, her office door was wide open so that she could see the corner of the outer door.

The wide-open door had admitted several murder cases in the past year, and one or two big civil cases. Nina was developing a rep as a last-resort, pull-it-out-of-the-hat litigator, rash but effective. But there were also the quiet, nonadversarial legal tasks, the timeless ones like drawing up deeds and drafting wills. This client, a very sick boy of nineteen, wanted to give specific bequests to friends and family—his tennis racket to his brother, his high school ring to his sister, his bowling shoes—bowling shoes!—to his best friend.

She gave away the bowling shoes in a choked-up monotone that Sandy would have to decipher tomorrow. He was a brave boy. His name was Alex, and he would be coming in in the morning.

She finished that tape and turned to the other pressing cases, the contract matter and the custody battle and the marijuana bust and the fender bender, jumping up like a jackrabbit to check the fax whenever her anxiety got the best of her.

The trick was to take one small solid step forward on each case, dictate a letter, return a phone call, rev up Lexis and look up a legal point. The court cases moved jerkily forward in a back-and-forth with opposing counsel, the speed contingent on many things out of her control. All she could do was take the next step on her side as soon as possible.

The afternoon passed and the sun went down in a flight of gray and purple clouds over the mountains. No fax.

One last check of the daily calendar. Jessie’s check was safely deposited. At eight-fifteen the next morning Nina would be in court on another matter. Jessie at ten. Alex and his mother sometime before lunch. A hearing on a custody case in the afternoon. Nina stretched, hands folded together behind her head, pushed her chair back, put her socks and Nikes back on, packed up, and pulled open the outer door.

The fax! It began to produce Jessie’s paperwork with excruciating slowness. She was due home and her eyes were shot. She stuffed the papers in her case to read later and ran out the door and into the parking lot.

A man waited by the Bronco, a platinum-haired hooligan inadequately disguised by a broad smile.

“I recognized your car,” he said. “You’re the lawyer.”

The accent was English. Nina didn’t beep the truck, but she kept her hand on the beeper, which with the right press of the finger would set off the alarm in the truck and bring somebody running. The man’s bleached-white hair had been buzzed practically to the scalp, but with long close-cut sideburns. He had an anciently busted nose and deep creases around the eyes. Heavy-duty black jeans, black T-shirt, and muddy thick-soled boots with chains on them . . . he was a skinhead from a foreign clime, exotic even in this town full of travelers.

They were alone in a darkening lot, with distant yellow pools from the streetlights across the street the only illumination.

“I’m a lawyer, yes,” Nina said. “But I don’t have time to talk right now.”

“It’s a rush,” the man said. She heard mockery in his tone and didn’t like it. He wore a buck knife in a pouch hanging from his waist. She didn’t like that either.

“I’ve lost something very important and it’s urgent that I get it back,” he went on.

She pulled out a card and gave it to him, saying, “Call me tomorrow. I can’t talk to you right now.”

A couple of fast steps forward and he was blocking the driver’s-side door. “Millions of dollars,” he said. “Now, don’t you think that’s worth chatting about? I had that seat saved, and that was my machine. Your young lady took my seat without my permission and now she’s stolen my jackpot. It’s that simple.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Balls. Jessie Leung. Should I talk to her instead of you?”

That was an alarming idea. “No,” Nina said. “You can discuss your problem with me. You had the seat before Mrs. Leung sat down?”

“Dead right, and that husband of hers promised to save the seat. I was gone less than five minutes. See the problem?”

“I see that you’re very upset. It’s a lot of money. If you want to talk to me about it, though, it has to be during regular business hours.”

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he said in an exaggerated falsetto, mocking her again. “Oh, I know you’d like me to. But this can’t wait.”

“What is it you want, Mr.—”

“I want half of it. Just half. A private deal, no publicity, and I go away. Simple, easy, everybody happy. Sale price, today only, since the bitch—I mean, since the young lady managed to slip it over on everyone and she gets something for that.”

“You want half the jackpot,” Nina said.

“That’s right.”

“Or?”

“Or what?”

“What’s the alternative?”

“The fucking alternative is too drastic for me to elaborate on at this fucking time. Get me?”

“I’ll tell my client what you said,” Nina said. She wished she was a black belt. She wished she carried a machine gun. She wished she wasn’t afraid, but she was in this deserted parking lot and all she wanted was a way out in one piece. “I can’t make any promises.”

“Tell her now. You got a mobile. All lawyers do.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“She’s hidin’ over in Alpine County with a bunch of Indians,” the man said. “The husband is nowhere around. I know just where she is, but I’m trying to be nice, talk to her mouthpiece, make a reasonable offer.”

“I don’t know how to reach her,” Nina repeated. “It’s going to have to wait.”

He pursed his lips, pretended to think about that. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call you about eleven tonight and you give me an answer. Don’t worry, I got your home number.”

“And just how did you get that?”

“Your number? How hard do you think that is?”

“Who are you?”

“Charlie Kemp,” he said. “The pleasure’s mine.” A sarcastic smile.

“Mr. Kemp, with this size claim, you need a lawyer. You need to know what your rights are and whether your claim is likely to prevail—I need to talk to my client, and I can’t get hold of her by eleven.”

“I will call you at eleven, sharp. Drive down there and talk to her. You got time.” When she didn’t move and he didn’t move, he made an elaborate show of stepping away from the Bronco. “Oh, pardon me. So sorry. I seem to be in the way.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Kemp.”

“Don’t blow it, love,” Kemp said. He reached out and chucked her on the chin, and Nina stood there, face burning, knowing she could get a lot worse if she fought back. He moved off jauntily toward the sidewalk. Nina waited until he was fifty feet away, then beeped the Bronco, threw open the door, jumped in, and locked herself inside.

Then, soaked in cold sweat, she breathed. All that was left was the sick taste of her humiliation, her physical helplessness, the fact that she had been forced to talk her way out instead of telling him what she really was thinking and pushing her way by him. She thought, I have to do something. I have had it with this physical menace from men.

But as soon as she got home, she called Paul.

Paul arrived at Nina’s house at ten. Scouting the neighborhood, he walked around the yard with Hitchcock and looked under the house. He was thorough and he was armed. Bob, oblivious, played ear-splitting music in his bedroom.

Nina made a fire in the orange Swedish stove in the living room. “Thank you for doing this,” she said as he stamped back in. “I’m going to wire the house.” He took off his brown bomber jacket and hung it on the banister.

“Good idea, but it won’t help tonight. I guess we wait,” he said. “I’ll take the call. He won’t bother you with me around.”

“It really got me that he knows where Jessie is, and that he has my home number. I have no doubt he knows where I live.” She had told Paul Jessie’s first name.

“Relax. The Man is here.”

“Would The Man like a beer?”

“Might take the edge off. So I’ll pass. Coffee, if you don’t mind.”

Nina couldn’t sit, so she loaded dishes into the dishwasher. Paul seemed to have gotten over his anger at her, or maybe he was just being professional? She wondered if she really was stringing him along, keeping him in Tahoe, because she needed him so much.

“Kenny said he did promise he’d hold the stool for him. I asked him tonight before I came over,” Paul called to her from the living room. “So aside from his bad attitude, what kind of case would Kemp have if he went after Jessie legally?”

“He has no legal right to one cent of that money,” Nina said. “He knows it. That’s why he’s trying to extort it, but he hasn’t said quite enough yet for me to go to the police. The one who pulls the handle wins the jackpot. He had no right to ask Kenny to hold the seat.”

“But Kenny said he would, and said he’d take a hundred bucks for it.”

“But Kenny didn’t have the power to hold the seat, so that agreement was invalid from the start.”

“Can’t blame him from one point of view,” Paul said. “I myself might behave badly under the circumstances.”

“Not this badly. I suppose I should have expected something like him to wriggle out from under the pine needles, but I’ve never had a case like this. I think he’s only the first.”

“We could tape him.”

“Inadmissible in court since he didn’t give permission. I could even be charged criminally like Linda Tripp.”

“The police could get a wiretap order. Or we could try to put him off again.”

“Give it a shot,” Nina said. “But I suspect he’s going to take it as a no, and then I don’t know what he’s going to do.” Paul had stretched out on the couch and turned on the TV with the sound muted and somehow found ESPN, which she had long ago deprogrammed. There was a golf match on. The players were standing around in their pastel shirts, staring at another player who was getting ready to putt.

“Well, at least she has a gun,” Paul said. “Maybe.”

“Paul?”

“Uh huh.”

“I really ought to talk to this jerk myself. My self-respect is suffering, thinking of how easily he leaned on me in the parking lot of my own building.”

“Why? I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Because I’m disgusted with myself. I do criminal law, the people get rough sometimes, and I have to run and hide the minute there’s even a hint of a physical altercation. I’m telling you, I’m sick of it!”

“Take a class in self-defense,” Paul said. “You could be a real Tasmanian devil.”

“Maybe I should. You really think I could ever get confident enough to take on a guy a foot taller than I am? I was thinking mace, or even—”

“No,” Paul said. “Forget guns, Nina. You wouldn’t kill him, and he’d get it from you. Mace? You’ve still got to have that physical confidence to get it out and hurt somebody.”

“I can imagine doing it but I’m not sure I
could
do it.”

“So you keep me by your side. On the couch, at the office, in the bed.”

“Too expensive,” Nina said. Paul laughed, and gave no sign of irritation. He was there on business, the business of protection.

“How’s it going with the cocktail waitresses?” Paul asked. Nina had just associated in with a Nevada attorney named Marlis Djina in an employment discrimination case against all four of the big gambling clubs at Tahoe.

“Cocktail servers,” Nina said, correcting him.

“As if there ever was a male cocktail waitress,” Paul said. He laughed again. He was actually in a good mood, because he was getting ready to out-muscle somebody, and this now began to irritate Nina. “That’s why it isn’t discrimination, that they have to wear high heels. All ‘cocktail servers’ do, so where’s the discrimination?” he went on.

“You think the Kiss My Foot campaign is pretty funny, don’t you?”

“Well, when they all got together and burned their spike heels on a mock fire for the press—that made them look silly,” Paul said. “Like the bra-burning.”

“That never happened. Some guys’ wishful thinking. And these women didn’t really burn high heels. They staged a symbolic protest. Some of them have to carry heavy drink trays in three-inch heels,” Nina said. “It’s torture.”

“I’d do that before I’d work in a coal mine, or weld heavy machinery, or be a sewer worker,” Paul said.

“Have you ever tried it?” Nina said. She went upstairs and found a pair of Manolo Blahnik spike-heel sandals with Roman lacing. “Put them on,” she commanded.