Motion for Murder (3 page)

"Damn it, Ken!" Howard's bluster stopped me in my tracks. "His goddamn commercials are making us a laughingstock!"

Howard and I didn't agree on the color of paint on the walls, but I couldn't argue with him there.

Ken said something I couldn't hear, but I heard Howard just fine. "Then we should get him the hell out of here! Is this the sort of practice you want to have?"

I'd heard enough. I wasn't comfortable eavesdropping on them, because I didn't want to risk getting fired but mostly because I couldn't hear Ken. Besides that, Wally was just coming out of the restroom rubbing his palms on his slacks while he clicked along on those rickety knees, and he zeroed in on me like a laser-guided missile. "What are you doing up here?" He was practically glowering with righteous indignation. Wally liked to keep the second floor unsullied by the riffraff secretarial staff downstairs. Since it seemed he didn't wash his hands in the restroom, he apparently wanted to sully it himself. "You got my Answers?"

Silence fell in Ken's office, and I bit my lip, wishing I'd had the good sense to eavesdrop when Wally was in court. The little non-hygienic weasel had a knack for showing up at just the wrong time. "I need an interpretation," I said, borrowing the blonde's bright smile, because everyone knew any man could be won over with charm and a bright smile.

Any man except Wally. "I knew you didn't belong in the legal field," he muttered, snatching the papers from my hand. I swallowed a "Same to you, fella," and waited while he frowned at his own handwriting.

Howard Dennis strolled out into the hallway while I was waiting. I tried hard not to glance his way, afraid I'd look as guilty as I felt. He was sporting the casual look, which for Howard meant his coat was unbuttoned, and his puffy little hands were thrust into his pants pockets. He came right up behind Wally and peered over his shoulder through half glasses, reading from the legal pad. I could have sworn Wally leaned back against him, but I was probably wrong. Probably Howard just blew in his ear.

"Good work, son," Howard told him.

Wally beamed.

Howard looked at me. "What are you doing up here?"

"I just asked her that," Wally said. "She can't do her job without help."

I waited for him to stick out his tongue at me. It wouldn't have surprised me. "I do need help, Howard," I said agreeably. "He gave me an emergency project, and I can't read his handwriting, and it's delayed my getting to work on your Complaint."

Wally's smile disappeared at the same time as Howard's, for an entirely different reason. "No," he snarled, shoving the pad back at me.

I stared at him. "You're not going to decipher it?"

"N-O," he said, enunciating so exactingly I could count the veins in his neck. "It says 'no.' Can't you read? It's perfectly clear to me. And by the way, the toilet's clogged. Call a plumber."

"After you type my Complaint," Howard added.

And Wally said, "Of course, of course."

 "But didn't you just use the bathroom?" I asked.

 "There's no need for insolence," Wally said. "Go. Type. Call."

 He'd make a fine dictator one day. I left the two of them stewing in their own grandeur while I fled back to the safety of the secretarial pool. By the time I got there, I was hungry from the stress of the second floor. I kept a box of Tastykakes stashed in my desk drawer for moments like this, so I hauled out a package of Butterscotch Krimpets. Nothing wrong with me that a good sugar fix couldn't cure.

Missy looked up when she heard the crinkle of the wrapper. "Uh-oh. Everything okay?"

I leaned my elbows on Wally's legal pad with a sigh. "What are the chances Wally will get fired by five o'clock?"

"Not good," she said. "He cleans Howard's pool on the weekends."

I grinned. She grinned back.

"You shouldn't eat those," Paige told me. "They'll go right to your hips."

"I can only hope," I said. If they did, it'd be the first time in my life I had hips. I finished the first Krimpet and eyed the second.

"Don't do it," Paige warned. "It's all fat and sugar."

"Your lipstick's smeared," Missy told her, and Paige retreated to her mirror in alarm.

"Don't worry about your hips," Missy said, even though I wasn't. "And don't worry about Wally. I'm going to put a box of Midol in his Christmas stocking this year. You'd be better off worrying about Dougie. His wife's on her way here to have lunch with him."

The Krimpet stuck halfway down my throat, and my breath stuck halfway up. I'd met Hilary Heath a few times, and those meetings had been only marginally more pleasant than a gynecological exam. The best word to describe Hilary was
sharp.
She had a body like a letter opener and the sort of eyes that could perform x-rays. More importantly, she had Dougie, and she protected her investment through unannounced inspections and merciless interrogation of the support staff. Hilary trusted very few and liked no one. Rumor had it that she'd once had a secretary fired for laughing at one of Dougie's lame comments. Hilary thought it indicated an unacceptable level of intimacy.

I shot a wild look at the clock. "You think we could take lunch early today?"

"You could," Missy said, "but why miss the fun when Hil finds Dougie up there with Bambi?"

"She's right," Paige said. "This'll be good."

It did have a certain appeal, but Missy seemed to be looking forward to Hilary's arrival a little too much.

"I don't know if I have the stomach for this," I said. "It might be too much confrontation for one day."

Missy shrugged. "Leave if you want, but I'm not going anywhere. Dougie's got this coming.
My wife loved it.
Huh."

Paige and I looked at each other.

"Besides," Missy added, "I'm skipping lunch today. I'm seeing Braxton tonight."

Braxton Malloy, the pharmacist Missy kept penciled-in on her Daytimer for a Monday night playdate. The relationship kept Missy in discounted prescriptions and qualified as a weekly aerobic workout at the same time.

Being the inveterate list maker that I am, working out has been on my to-do list for years. I just never seem to be able to find something I liked enough to stick with. At the moment I was trying to practice yoga, but because I had the flexibility of a two by four, that wasn't going so well. And I had a little trouble achieving oneness with the universe, since the universe was always conspiring to cheat me out of the finer things in life, like patience, wisdom, and a good parking spot at the mall.

Maybe I needed a Braxton. But first I needed to escape Hilary Heath.

Women were put on this earth to be mothers. This is what I'm told by my own, whenever she's feeling out of sorts over having no grandkids, which is pretty much all the time. It seemed I'd experienced the allotted lifetime quotient of monthly periods without putting my uterus to better use. I think my father wants grandkids, too, but he's willing to wait for the husband first. My mother interviews potential sperm donors in the supermarket. Last Christmas she gave me pacifiers, baby booties, and a box of Pampers. I figure the Pampers will come in handy in another fifty or sixty years.

Fortunately for my mother, my little sister Sherri came along. Sherri's thirty-one and desperate for a husband, and she looks under every available rock to find one. As far as I'm concerned, she's a born mother. She's been telling me to wash my hands and wear clean underwear since she was five. She has childbearing hips and a good attitude about the whole baby thing, and I give her a lot of credit. It's not easy balancing my mother's desperation with her own. It couldn't be easy dealing with her own masochism, either. For the past two years, she'd been working at Williams Bridal selling wedding gowns to prospective brides.

Sherri and I get together weekly for lunch out of our mother's orbit, mostly so she could grouse about her Saturday night date, and she was waiting for me when I got to the Lincoln Diner. The Linc was your typical New Jersey diner, lots of vinyl and mirrors and chrome, and noise. It wasn't the Four Seasons, but the food was good, and the booths were clean. I slid in across from her, noticing she looked especially morose.

"It's never gonna happen for me," she'd announced before I'd picked up my menu.

I'd heard this before. "Sure, it will," I said, which is what I always said. I believed it. Sherri was pretty and curvy and could convincingly pretend she liked sports.

"No." She shook her head at the silverware. "No, it won't. You should've met the guy I went out with this weekend." She rolled her eyes. "And I thought pocket protectors went out of style."

I looked at her over the menu. "You went out with a professor?"

"Nah." She shook her head. "A student."

We paused while the waitress delivered a basket of rolls and two glasses of water, and then I said, "You might want to try dating men."

"He's a forty-seven year old junior," Sherri said. "He went back to college after his wife ran off with an engineer. He decided he was going to make something of his life. I think he wants to be a proctologist or something."

Jeez. I put down my menu and picked up a roll. "Listen, Sher, I don't think he's the one for you."

"No kidding." Sherri stared into her glass of water. "I can see it now. I help put him through medical school, and he leaves me for someone younger. It's a classic story."

Except the classic story wasn't about a doctor who graduated right into retirement. I buttered my roll and kept my mouth shut.

Sherri lifted her shoulders and sighed heavily. "So I saw the new commercial today. That Doug Heath isn't too bad-looking."

The waitress came back to take our orders. Caesar salad for Sherri, fettuccini with meat sauce for me. It was shaping up to be a stressful week, and I wanted to be fortified.

"Dougie's already got kids," I said when the waitress had moved on. "Two, possibly more." I'd been surprised the Ice Queen could bear children, but maybe she'd been warmer earlier in the marriage. I know if I were married to Dougie, I'd be a glacier after eighteen years.

"He could have more," Sherri pointed out. "It's easier for men. Tony Randall had kids when he was in his seventies." She sighed again. "It's just not fair."

I agreed with her there.

"Mom wants to set me up with Frankie Ritter." She picked up a roll, looked at it, and put it back in the basket. "I don't know. Frankie
Ritter
?
He wet the bed until he was eighteen." She picked up the roll again. "He does have blond hair, though."

Sherri had always had a thing for blond hair. As a kid, she'd thrown out all of her brunette Barbies and kept the blond PJs. She wouldn't even look twice at George Clooney, which gives you some idea why she's still single. "Frankie Ritter's built like a tuba," I said.

Sherri blinked. "I hadn't noticed."

Right. The blond hair must have distracted her.

"I don't know." She tore a chunk off her roll and tucked it in her cheek. I buttered a fresh roll. Between us, we emptied the breadbasket in ten minutes flat, and by then our meals had arrived. After Sherri had salted and I had cheesed, she said, "So about that commercial. I thought it was kind of…"

"Low class?"

"Compelling. Persuasive."

Oh. Sure.

"I mean, every penny I deserve? That's good stuff. Makes me want to go fall down somewhere." She speared a lettuce leaf and thought about it. "I want to meet a Doug Heath," she said finally. "A blond Doug Heath."

"No, you don't," I said. "He's scum. He lies. He cheats on his wife. He cheats on his girlfriend."

"Yeah, so why are you working for him?"

That stopped me cold. I cut another quarter of my fettuccini and thought about it. "Well, the job market's tight," I said finally. "Besides, there's two other lawyers in the firm
"

"Blondes?" she asked hopefully.

"One's sixty-eight and one's fifty," I said.

She gave me a look. "Like that matters. Tony Randall, remember?"

"Maybe those Hollywood types are friskier in their old age," I said. "I can't see Howard or Ken having sex." And I didn't want to see it. Just the thought of it was enough to make my eyelids slam shut. "Can we talk about something else?"

"Suit yourself. Mom wants us to come over to dinner on Friday. She's making meatloaf."

Dinner at my mother's. It was four days away, and I wasn't hungry already. Except her meatloaf could make Betty Crocker jealous. One thing about my mother, she didn't let inconsequential medical findings about, say, cholesterol and fat content alter her recipes. Lots of eggs, lots of shortening, and no lean anything. After dinner at my parents', you weren't hungry for the next forty-eight hours. It's probably why my father had been eating one meal a day for fifteen years

Sherri shifted uneasily. "She's inviting Frankie Ritter."

"I can't make it," I said immediately. "I have to work late."

"You have to help me. I need to get married, Jamie. I want to have a baby. I want to quit the shop."

This was news. I looked up from my dish. "Why?"

"It's like torture." She jabbed at a crouton. It skidded across the plate and onto the table. "Nothing but happy engaged women
girls
day after day, and I have to stand there and smile like I'm glad for them. Well, not that I'm
not
glad for them, but I want to be glad for me someday, too, you know?"