Reilly 04 - Breach of Promise (39 page)

The whole town appeared to have come out in force to hear the verdict, a testament to the extraordinary amount of media coverage the trial was receiving. Every seat was filled. Many people stood at the back of the room.

Nina took her place next to Lindy. Sandy sat on the other side of her. Genevieve and Winston were already waiting. They nodded shortly and turned their attention to the dais. Nina crossed her fingers on her lap and also waited for Milne with an eagerness so extreme it felt painful.

The next few minutes, while the judge got settled and the jury was brought in, she passed through eternity and came out the other side. If they lost . . .

Mrs. Lim adjusted reading glasses on her nose. She cleared her throat, looked up at the court, and then back down at the paper she held in her hand. She read the verdict.

They had won.

The jury awarded Lindy Markov a total of sixty-eight point six million dollars.

Nina anchored herself to the table with her hands, suddenly unable to see through the blur of activity, or hear through the din. Dimly, she saw the judge leave, and the jury, casting smiles her way, filing out.

They had won.

The room around her rocked like a foundering ship. Nina’s awareness narrowed to the whiteness of her hands and further to the sensitive tips of her fingers where they held tight to the wood as wave upon wave of elation swept over her, knocking the breath out of her.

They had won.

And she couldn’t believe it. Because in spite of all the plans, in spite of the fantasies, she had never expected to win.

Her sense of unreality extended into her surroundings. The courtroom had altered, and now appeared more palatial, grander, as if the roof had opened up and sun now streamed in where dull incandescents had once prevailed.

Steadying herself, trying to control the distorting tumult of her emotions, she stood up.

Lindy had squeezed her lids down tight over her eyes. Riesner talked rapidly into Mike’s ear.

Mike’s face looked drawn. On the way out, he fell against a guy from CNN who was leaving one of the rows and who just managed to catch him.

“Congratulations,” the crowd in the courtroom told Lindy and Nina, who fielded a dozen handshakes and high fives.

Lindy’s friend Alice hugged Nina, saying, “You did it, doll. It’s a left hook to the face of all those grinning baboons out there!”

Lindy grabbed Nina by the arm. “My God,” she said. “If my dad could see me now!”

“Lindy, I’m so glad for you,” said Nina, but the words fell flat. Nothing short of a mountain falling down could truly articulate something so huge and so fantastic.

She could feel Lindy’s fingernails squeezing into her arm, could smell the excitement in the close air of the room. She could hear the voices, all merging into pandemonium. She stood still, soaking up the sweetness of the moment, thinking of Bob.

But the crowds were pushing, and Lindy’s hand on her arm began to tremble.

“Let’s get out of here,” Nina said.

“We’re trapped,” Lindy whispered, looking panicked.

“We’ll have more to say later when it sinks in,” Nina said to the reporters, pulling Lindy away.

“Take the private hallway,” she told Lindy and Alice. “Stay there until they’re gone.”

“Thank you for everything, Nina,” Lindy said, clinging to her hand.

“It’s a goddamned triumph,” Alice said, pulling her away and hustling her through the door by the jury box.

And a triumph it was.

With Genevieve and Winston on one side of her and Sandy on the other, Nina gave the victory salute on the steps of the courthouse seen across California and the country on the evening news.

That evening, Matt and Andrea came over with two bottles of champagne. While the kids took pillows off the sofa and bounced down the stairs on them, the adults grabbed jackets and retired to the deck.

Matt drank one bottle entirely by himself. After several toasts, he said, “There’s something I want to say to Nina.”

“Sounds serious,” Andrea said, filling her glass.

“It is,” he said. “Nina, now I don’t think it’s a secret I’ve never liked what you do. I’ve never hidden my opinion of your chosen profession. You work too much. You drive yourself too hard for a bunch of troublemakers who could never be grateful enough, in my opinion.”

“Oh, now, Matt,” Nina said.

He put up a hand to stop her. “I never thought it was worth it. I’ve said it before. That shouldn’t surprise you. Well,” he said, “I’m going to admit something. Today proved I was wrong. Apparently, what you do has some merit after all.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Andrea laughed. “Now and then, three and a half million bucks worth of merit!”

“That’s right,” Matt said. “And I hope you know how much you deserve it, too, Nina.”

“And it couldn’t happen to a nicer specialist in horrible cases,” Andrea said, patting Nina’s hand.

“Nina, has it sunk in yet?” Matt asked, looking at her. “From now on, you can pretty much buy anything you want.”

“A Roche Bobois couch,” Andrea said. “Duette blinds for the front windows. Hey, Nina, you can finally break down and buy yourself a decent pair of jeans. I’ve been meaning to tell you that the ones you’ve been wearing have a couple of holes under the back pocket.”

“A yacht,” said Matt.

“Really? Could she buy a yacht?” Andrea asked.

“Yes, she could,” Matt said. “I think. How much is a yacht anyway?”

“I have no idea,” Andrea said.

“To answer your original question, Matt,” Nina said. “No. It hasn’t sunk in.”

“Okay, here it comes,” Andrea said. “Here’s the question every celebrity in mourning, every landslide victim, and every lottery winner must answer at some point to satisfy the curious onlookers.”

“What question is that, Andrea?” asked Nina.

“How does it feel?”

Nina lay back on the lounge chair and pulled her coat tightly around her, staring up at the sky. “It feels like one of those stars up there just fell into my backyard.”

The vote had been nine to three, the minimum. Patti Zobel made it clear afterward, as she spoke to the press in the hall, that she had been the ninth vote favoring Lindy. Courtney Poole said it had been terribly close. Right before Cliff’s collapse, he had just about persuaded several of the other jurors to change their minds and vote for Mike, but then the judge had said to start fresh. When they returned to their original positions, and added in Patti’s emphatic arguments in favor of Lindy, Mike’s support had evaporated.

For two days, Nina enjoyed her brush with fame. Interviewed by the major networks, public television, radio and even on a website Bob helped her organize, she didn’t have any more time to deal with her own shock.

The attention often had a slightly hostile quality to it and generally varied according to gender. Men expressed disbelief and outrage at Lindy’s success. Women called the case cataclysmic and a vindication.

Nina disliked watching the issues get melted down by the media into a gender war. She said over and over in the interviews that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. She reminded everyone that the Markov case was unique in its details because of Lindy’s participation in the business. Most palimony cases had more to do with a long-term emotional connection and involved a request for support or rehabilitation. She didn’t think it would advance the cause of female financial equity between couples who lived together. Several other jurors, also interviewed, seconded her guess, saying that the issue was always Lindy’s work.

The jury had agreed that the separate property agreement was not a valid contract, that Lindy had signed the agreement with an understanding that there was a promise of marriage attached. They also agreed that some form of oral contract existed between the parties that promised Lindy not half of the company, but a share, which they had struggled to quantify, settling on one-third.

Susan Lim said on local television, “Anybody can come up with a good idea. Anybody can get it built. What really counts in business is marketing. If nobody buys, you make no money. Ms. Markov struck me as an intelligent person who definitely played a large part in their success. Who came up with their biggest product? She did. That was our reasoning, based on careful and objective consideration of the evidence.”

The jury had heard the evidence, and they had reached a decision for Lindy. It was the American jury system at its best.

And it was over.

Money! Money!
shrieking mad celestial
money of illusion!
—Allen Ginsberg

Paul flew back to Sacramento from Washington on Friday. He heard the news about Nina’s verdict from a television set while biting down on a thick cheeseburger at Sam’s in Placerville. Sam’s was closing after thirty years and he was sure going to miss the old barn with the sawdust on the floors, and the hokey nostalgic decor.

As Nina wasn’t taking his phone calls, he was going to see her personally. He had hoped to make it up there for the verdict, as she was usually at her most accessible at the moment the pressure let up, but this would have to do.

He was still angry at the way she had treated him, but he knew the stunt he had pulled had merited a slap on the wrist. However, that should not have included this telephone silence or such a prolonged lack of contact.

Still, he was not surprised by her overreaction. Big trials always brought with them a loss of control. Lawyers belted each other, clients turned to drink, witnesses left town, strong judges turned into wimps. He himself had possibly overreacted slightly to Riesner. What was the big deal? He had barely hurt the guy.

He didn’t give a shit if he never worked for her again. He wanted something else from this warm female encased like Sleeping Beauty under cold glass. He wanted to break the glass and grab her, shake her back to life. But he couldn’t do that. She would never forgive him for doing that. She had put up that glass to protect herself in the working world, and that was a place she had always liked too much to give up.

Until now. Now she had won her big case, the big case. She couldn’t expect another with stakes like this one in her lifetime, could she? Like Sam’s in Placerville, a phase in Nina’s life seemed to be ending.

Barring any unforeseeable circumstances, Nina was now a millionaire. Markov still had thirty days to appeal. He would probably settle instead, and even if he did appeal, the lawyers would receive their due sooner or later.

She had been evasive with him about the details, but Paul knew a canny lady like Nina would not pass the opportunity up to make a killing on a case like this one. She had struggled along for almost a year while working the Markov case. She was on top. She had nothing more to prove.

She could even quit working.

She could move to Carmel and live with him, break open her glass coffin on her own.

A brilliant future stretched out before her. He finished his meal, quaffed a beer, and stopped to plunk a quarter into Madame Zelda’s slot for what would be the last time.

The impassive, scarfed wooden gypsy shifted in her glass case, unseating a layer of dust. A ruby light lit up behind her. Her finger roved among the yellow cards laid out in front of her. The finger stopped. A card fell into the slot.

The serpent crawls and does his harm
The thunder raises a distant alarm
The waters shift in restless lake
You face great danger for her sake.
A fool and his money are soon parted.

“Have a good retirement, you old witch,” Paul murmured uneasily, and he could have sworn Madame Zelda’s eyes flashed back.

That night, they lay together in Nina’s four poster bed, having made love twice in an hour, first on a lounge pad under the moon on a private piece of deck, and again on the bed, or at any rate, partially on the bed. Bob was in Monterey with his grandfather, and would be flying out of San Francisco on a school trip to Williamsburg on Sunday. He would be gone for the next week.

Nina put a hand on Paul’s cheek and rubbed.

“I love a warm welcome,” Paul said lazily, his eyes closed. “We should argue frequently.”

“No. Let’s never argue again.”

“If we got married and lived in Carmel, we would never argue.” He had said what he came to say. He reached out a hand and ran it over her soft thigh.

“Why don’t you move to Tahoe, Paul?” she replied, not entirely unexpectedly.

“Would you marry me if I did?”

She pushed her head into his chest sleepily, saying, “I would think about it.”

“Yeah, but would you do it?”

“Don’t you know you complicate everything?”

“I don’t see it that way. To me, it’s simple. Man, woman, desire, love, to quote the great Eric Burdon. Oh, I’ve thought about it. But I have a very good business down there. I’ve been working in Carmel longer than you’ve been working in Tahoe. Seriously. Come to me.”

“What about your Washington job?” Her voice was very drowsy.

“I’d drop it like a hot potato for you, my love.”

But Nina had stopped listening. She appeared to have fallen into a nap. Paul yawned. The big bed was a universe unto itself, the covers so thick and warm . . . he drifted off, too.

Paul woke up about one, his stomach growling. Nina still lay on her side, her long brown hair spilling onto her white shoulder. What a shame he was starving. He shook her gently and said, “Awake, my little honeybee. We skipped dinner. Let’s eat.”

She opened her eyes and seemed glad to see him. What more could a man ask for? Except a good meal?

“But I do have one more question about this business before we throw back the covers and you expose that enticing body of yours to the air and my worshipful gaze.”

“Wha’?” she said.

“About Clifford Wright.”

“What about him?”

“You sure got lucky there.”

“Huh?”

“Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”

She was waking up fast now. “Odd?” she said, the intelligence returning to her eyes. As he watched, absorbed by the transformation, the emphases of her face shifted from soft cheeks and full lips to jawbone and eyebrows. “There’s nothing new on him. Case closed. Just a freak medical occurrence.”