“You’d better get on the stick, then,” I counseled her. “The longer you wait, the colder the trail’s going to get. And the quality of lawyer you want is booked way out in advance.”
“I know.” She gave me a tired smile. “I wanted to get your input before I made the conclusive decision to go ahead. The state of California is going to spend a fortune trying to find out who murdered an international drug dealer who was an unredeemable scumbag who would have spent the rest of his life in a federal maximum-security prison if he hadn’t been killed. It won’t be a popular move—especially if the shooter turns out to be a renegade federal agent.”
I nodded in agreement. “Nora, I’m flattered that you wanted my opinion, although you could have come to this decision without me. You know what you’re doing, I can see that from the short amount of time I’ve been here.”
“I don’t know if I could have or not, but thanks for the compliment. I feel more secure about it now, believe me.”
“Then this trip was well worth it. Not only for the help, but to see you after all these years, still looking great and fighting the good fight.” I smiled at her. “So when are you going to ask the lucky guy?”
The smile she sent back to me was tentative. She hesitated a moment, then stood up and walked over to me.
“Now.”
Dinner was at her house again. Bad take-out Chinese. It didn’t matter—I had no appetite anyway. The Scotch didn’t help either, but I knocked it down and poured myself another.
“You had this planned before I came up here,” I berated her. I’d been blindsided, and I was pissed off about it. I hate being manipulated.
“I didn’t. I swear it.”
“Bullshit.” I was steaming. “You set me up.”
“It’s the truth, Luke, please believe me. I wouldn’t run a con on you.” She wasn’t happy with my attitude. Which was too bad, because I was frosted from what felt like transparent duplicity.
“Well, what’s this?”
“I didn’t ask you to come up here so I could set you up. I didn’t…” She tailed off.
“You didn’t what?” I sounded like a jealous husband who’s caught his wife in a sleazy affair.
I looked at my glass. It was almost empty. I put it down. I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, and I didn’t want whiskey fucking my head up. “You didn’t what, Nora?” I said again.
“Want to use you.” She was sitting across the room from me, looking miserable.
“Then what?”
“I…needed someone to talk to, and I’d been thinking about you, from the publicity last fall. Actually, I’d thought about calling you a couple years ago, after you won that big case. Seeing your name in the paper after all these years, I got a rush of pride. I know that sounds silly, but I did.”
“A rush of pride? For what?”
“That someone I knew, who I’d shared an important part of my life with, was so successful. Reflected glory, you know what I mean?”
That’s just what I needed. A woman whose own life hadn’t turned out the way she’d envisioned it living vicariously through a man she didn’t know, but had, superficially, in the distant past. As if the relationship in the past legitimized one in the present, even though the present for us had never existed.
“So this was a good excuse,” she continued. “Then once we talked, I got to thinking about how right you’d be for this. Bill Fishell agreed with me, but I needed to know how you’d feel about it. The case, I mean,” she said hurriedly, “not about taking it on.”
“You should’ve been straight with me up front,” I said. “It would’ve saved me time, you money, and you wouldn’t have built your expectations up. I couldn’t get into this for all the teabags in China.”
She started crying. Softly, her head in her hands.
“Oh, shit, Nora, don’t, come on.” I walked over to her, put a hand on her shoulder. She was trembling. “Come on, don’t.”
She looked up at me. Her eyes were red. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m happy to be here for you as a friend. But friendship and work are separate, and should stay separate.”
“I know,” she said, even more miserably than before.
I felt like a schmuck. Not because of what I’d said: it had to be said. But because she was so unhappy and wasn’t keeping a stiff upper lip.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked. When in doubt, apply booze.
“Yes, please.”
“What do you want?”
“Whatever you’re having.”
I poured out a decent shot for her, refreshed my own glass. Then I sat down next to her.
“I’m not in the prosecutor business anymore. I left that a long time ago, and I’ve never looked back.” I caught myself. “Actually, I did look back, for a number of years. But I got over it, and now I am over it. I don’t want to go back to that.”
She started to say something, but held her tongue and drank some Scotch instead.
“I’m married,” I went on. “Fairly recently, after a traumatic divorce. We have a small son. I have a nice, easy practice. In the past three years I’ve almost been killed twice, and there’ve been other traumas, too. I’ve moved out of the fast lane, Nora. I’m not even on the superhighway anymore. I’m just a plain old country-road, lawyer, doing the best he can.”
“Which is very good. I know what you’ve been doing.”
I let that pass. I’d already blown off all the steam I wanted to blow off.
“This is going to be an intense, time-consuming job. Too time-consuming. And I don’t want to be away from my wife and child, not for the months this could take.”
She nodded, agreeing with all my very good points.
“Also—if federal agents are involved, and I think they are, like you do and your sheriff and even Bill Fishell, I presume…”
She nodded her head again.
“…this will get messy. You don’t know where it’s going to lead. These are rough and tough people, you get in their path at your peril.”
“Physical danger?”
“It could happen. Anything could happen. None of it enjoyable. Which is why, my long-ago friend, the answer to your question is no. Listen, Nora, there are plenty of great lawyers who can do this job and will be happy to take it on. You won’t have any problem getting one.”
She’d stopped crying. She looked up at me. “They won’t be you.”
“They’ll be better, believe me.”
“You’re a celebrity, Luke.”
“That’s really what I want to hear.”
“Well, you are, whether you like it or not. You have a Teflon shield, Luke. You’re unassailable, you’re a hero because of what happened out in the desert. Your motives can’t be attacked, unlike those of a career criminal defense lawyer, a Gerry Spence or Johnnie Cochran. You aren’t political, and you’ve worked both sides of the aisle. I don’t know another lawyer in the country with your qualifications, honestly.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to be a celebrity. I hate it. All those interviews, they were awful. If I live the rest of my life in peaceful anonymity, I’ll die a happy man. I’m really serious about that. And there are plenty of great lawyers who are as qualified as I am for this. Better lawyers than me, and you know that.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to take no for an answer,” she said. “For now, anyway.”
“Forever,” I told her firmly.
She didn’t reply to my objections. Instead, she walked over to the dining room table, picked up the cartons of Chinese food, and tossed them in the trash.
“There’s a bar about twenty miles from here. It isn’t too rowdy and they cook up decent Buffalo chicken wings. It’s about as haute as our local cuisine gets. Let’s not end our time together on a downer, okay?”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “Lady, that’s the best idea you’ve had all day.”
Long-necked Buds, spicy chicken wings, ranch dressing. When you’re in the right mood, that’s a combination that fell right out of heaven.
Hap’s Happy Hour was another throwback joint, like the lunchroom. When Nora and I first walked in, I felt an unsettling déjà vu; it reminded me of the Brigadoon, the killing field out in the desert. I let the emotions roil around inside of me for a moment, then I sloughed them off. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, not like that. And if it did, I’d be dead and it wouldn’t matter.
Nora seemed to know most of the people here; she nodded and said hellos as we navigated the length of the room. There was no waitress service—we placed our orders at the take-out counter and settled into a back booth with a couple of cold beers.
“Quaint,” I observed.
“Isn’t it?” She drank her beer straight from the bottle. “It fits me…now. Who’d’ve thunk it?” She smiled at me and held up her bottle.
I clinked mine to hers. “To the good old days,” I toasted. “And those to come.”
“I’ll drink to that. I hope that’s a prophecy.”
I inventoried the place. It was crowded—mostly men, although some wives and girlfriends were there, too. People that I assumed were typical for the area—cowboys, loggers, working-class men. The women had the same look in a feminine way. No one was dressed up, not a sports coat or tie in the crowd. Or skirt, for that matter, except for Nora, who was still in her district attorney clothes. Wood tables and booths, sawdust on the floor. Part of it had been sectioned off for dancing. Your basic shitkicker bar—a good place to get a load on, if one was so inclined.
“Come here often?” I asked her.
Nora shook her head. “I don’t go anywhere often. I’m too tired after work to do anything except go home, eat, work, watch television, go to bed. I’m not a party girl, to put it mildly. Besides, I don’t go to bars alone.” She flashed a smile. “Bad for my image.”
I wondered if she was dating, or had. My gut told me she wasn’t and hadn’t. She might have become acclimated to this region, but I didn’t think there would be many men here she’d spark to. Even though Dennis had fallen, he’d been a star once. She’d savored caviar, hamburger wasn’t ever going to taste the same.
“You’re going to miss it around here, I’ll bet,” she teased me in a semimocking fashion. I had the feeling that was how she dealt with her world; with irony. Whatever it takes to keep you going. I’ve been there.
“I’ll miss
you.”
I said that to be nice, but I meant it, once the words were out of my mouth. She was a nice woman, attractive, and we’d had good times together back then, when we had all been young and the world had been full of promise, unlimited.
“Thank you, Luke. That’s nice to hear from a man like you.”
“What kind of man is that?” I enjoy being flattered as much as the next guy, but this was a mite uncomfortable.
“Successful. Purposeful. Has his life in order. And is cute.” She took a quick swallow.
“If you only knew the truth,” I bantered. This was our last night together, I’d turned down her proposal, I needed to keep the evening light.
“You say.”
Our order was called. I walked over to the counter and got the baskets. It smelled good and there was plenty of it. I could tell, both from the clientele in here and people I’d seen on the street in town, that the locals took their eating seriously. What they lacked in quality they made up in quantity, and then some. Besides the wings, ranch dressing, biscuits, and fries, there were onion rings in bricks, an added bonus. Between lunch and this I was going to chow down more cholesterol than I put into my system in a month at home, but no one from home was watching. I bought a couple more Buds and carried everything back to our booth.
We dug in, cleaning the grease off our fingers on paper napkins and Handi Wipes. “You’re getting the knack,” Nora said, watching me lick the last speck of skin off a wing.
“I’m a fast learner.”
“Sure you don’t want to—”
I put up a hand to stop her. “Look, Nora. You’ve got a righteous case, and it’s good that you’re pursuing it. With the state’s money in your bank account you can do it the way it needs to be done. But I’m not your man. I’m just not.”
“Okay.” She bit into a piece of onion ring. “I had to give it one more shot.”
“That’s fine. But no more, all right?”
“Yes.”
The jukebox was strictly country-western. A slow Randy Travis came on. A few couples got up and started to dance. For a fleeting moment I thought of asking Nora, but decided not to. The memory of our toes touching the night before, and my guilty-husband reaction to it, cautioned me against physically touching her.
She started on her second beer, put it down. “You haven’t asked me about Dennis.”
I don’t know if I flushed—I definitely felt hot. “I didn’t feel I should bring him up.”
“Why not?”
“Embarrassed, I guess. I don’t know.”
“No one ever wants to talk about him. The people here, my parents, his former colleagues back in Denver and Washington. It’s like he’s the family retard you want to keep hidden in the attic.”
“I wasn’t thinking that way.”
“Are you embarrassed for me, or yourself?”
“Both,” I admitted.
“Well…” She took another pull from her beer.
“I’d
like to talk to you about him. Is that okay?”
“Sure.”
“He killed himself.”
So I’d been right about that.
“He blew his brains out, four years ago.”
“Jesus, Nora, I’m sorry, I’m…”
“Uh-uh. Don’t be. Nobody made him pull the trigger. And don’t be sorry for me, I’ve had enough sorry to last me ten lifetimes. I’m sick to my stomach at people feeling sorry for me.”
I was mute. I didn’t know how to react, what to say.
She didn’t need my complimentary voice. She needed to spew this out.
“It all turned bad so fast neither of us could understand it. And once it started going downhill, bam, it was an avalanche.” She picked up a piece of chicken, started to eat it, dropped it back in the basket. “Which didn’t help our sex life, either.”
Oh, fuck. Where was this going to end?
“Sex between us was never good anyway, Dennis wasn’t much of a performer. It wasn’t important to him. He lived for work.” She gave me a sideways, embarrassed look.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t think she was coming on to me, but it sure was awkward, sitting there and listening to this.
“Part of his lack of sexual interest was that he was sterile. We didn’t know that until we tried having a family. I think that contributed to our sex life going bad—worse than it had been, I mean. I think it contributed to everything going bad, to tell you the truth. He wanted kids, more than me. He was devastated when we found out.”