Reilly 13 - Dreams of the Dead (26 page)

“That’s good?” Sandy examined Nina’s face. “That’s bad.”

“That’s no good. That money will do no one any good sitting in a trust account. But with the affidavits declaring that Jim strongly objects to the sale as a whole, we probably will end up with all the net proceeds tied up.”

“I hear it in your voice,” Sandy said. “You know more than you’re telling. You and Paul should talk to me. My friend at the clerk’s office says she heard from her friend at the DA’s office that they have a theory Paul killed Jim. I know he was involved and I’m not the only one.”

“Let’s not talk anymore about that.”

“Soon, though.”

Sandy seemed to be looking at Nina for a reaction. Nina didn’t react. Sandy examined a fingerprint on her lampshade.

N
ina retrieved her briefcase from her office and stuffed paperwork inside, then went back to Sandy’s desk.

Sandy was on the phone. “Mrs. Ravel? . . . You and I need to talk. . . . No, that won’t do. . . . Nope, not Friday either.” Sandy unspooled her black eyes in a straight line toward Nina’s. “Three thirty this afternoon is perfect. Here’s good, since that’s where the creeping alien from outer space is based. . . . Uh-huh, mildew again.” She hung up. The filing was done, the office functioned like a precision German astrolabe, and Nina felt a rush of gratitude.

“How much did you say these new client chairs will cost?” she asked.

Sandy showed no signs of joy or triumph. She merely fingered her lower lip thoughtfully. “About four hundred apiece. We need to replace all of them. Gotta match, you know. We have an image to protect. You’re doing well in this town. People like seeing you are confident and successful. They look for signs of those things. And you show respect for our clients with nicer furniture. Comfort to butts in trouble.”

“Okay, up to four hundred. Your choice.” Nina signed a blank check and handed it to Sandy. “Go to that place in Reno. There’s no place here at the Lake that’ll have office chairs like the ones that are already so perfectly realized in your imagination.”

Sandy nodded, tucking the check neatly into the pocket of her skirt. “Right now? What about the clients when you get back? I need to be here.”

“Go. You know you want to. I’ll be back in an hour to hold the fort.” It was an old cowboys-and-Indians joke between them.

“You’re in a good mood for someone shootin’ from the Alamo,” Sandy said. “Sure you trust me to choose?”

“I trust you. As for my good mood, you know how skulls grin?”

Sandy didn’t say anything. She gazed steadily at Nina.

“I believe Kurt wants to go back to Europe,” Nina said. “I’m damned if I’ll leave my home and country. Not that he’s given me the option. If he goes, he’ll likely go back with his old girlfriend.”

“Well, if he does, he doesn’t deserve you.”

“I have a good life. It was good before Kurt came into it, and it’ll be good again. I’ve got plans, Sandy. You’re right. Let’s spruce up the place. I’ll get Bob a better music teacher. Buy some new shoes.” Further positive thinking failing her, Nina sat down in one of the orange chairs, which felt threadbare and hard. “Get us the best, most luxurious, most beautiful chairs you can find, okay? Ones that will last a long time. Tahoe is my home. This is our business. I’m not leaving.”

“Bravo.”

Nina looked at the short lady in front of her. “You’re a great person to work with, Sandy. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You’re not gonna get all funny and hug me or something, are you?”

“Are you really writing a book? A novel?”

“That Paul. You can’t tell a man anything. I did start one.”

“About a woman lawyer?”

A slight curve of the lip showed Sandy was laughing out loud in her own way. “Yes and no. I want to write a bestseller. It’s not me and it’s not you. It’s a fantasy. Kind of fun, I hope. A parody, but true bottom line.”

“That’s a relief,” Nina said with a little chuckle. “You know, you made me nervous thinking this had anything to do with our business.”

“It does happen to be a woman legal assistant in a small law firm. She solves problems other people think are trivial, which aren’t.”

“And where is this little fictional firm?”

“Not far from here, fictionally. Down the hall, you might say.”

“I see. Don’t forget about fictional client confidentiality.”

“I can invent my own stories. I’m not very far along, of course. But you know, legal assistants are the front lines. Like when our client’s soon-to-be-ex nosed his Uzi through the outside door. Just the barrel. I ducked down and called 911, remember? I used that in the book, but I made the gun a Desert Eagle.”

“Oh, good, nobody will make the connection then.”

“Well, then, Reno here I come,” Sandy said. “And they won’t get one quarter off me I don’t want to give them. You better get signing, then run. Meeting with Michael Stamp in thirty minutes.” Nina finished her desk work, grabbed her briefcase, and hustled down the hall of the Starlake Building and out to the slushy parking lot.

Bluer skies, however. The sky was changing, clearing.

O
n the short drive down the boulevard to Stamp’s office Nina called Paul, who filled her in on his talks with Cyndi’s husband and the mechanic. She found her mind drifting. How strange that Paul, in danger of being discovered by the police as the murderer of Jim Strong, could invest himself so thoroughly in another case.

He must have noticed her lack of interest. “You think I’m ignoring the Strong problem? I’m not. At this moment there’s not a damn thing to be done. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual for me.”

Nina tried to focus on what he’d said. “I’m glad you’re in touch with Michelle Rossmoor again. I’d love to see her. Catch up. Meet their kids.”

“She feels the same.”

Nina swerved to avoid a car that had spun out on the slick road. She could not wait for drier roads and snowless days. “I’m worried, Paul.”

“Of course.”

“Your future rests on the body of Jim Strong, and God only knows that’s an awful place for it to lie. Tomorrow’s the hearing. If Judge Flaherty orders the money into escrow, what’s the plan? You have a plan for those GPS coordinates?”

Paul, who didn’t ordinarily do glum, did it now. “Maybe.”

How long have I known Paul? Nina asked herself. A decade
before, when she was a harried law student, she and Paul had come close to falling in love—Paul, with his violent temper and his love of freedom, who did not match her. She had thought she might someday have another child—Paul was not interested. Not appropriate for me and mine, she had decided. Her logical, linear mind had dismissed him, and much later, when Kurt came back, every fairy-tale image had fallen into place.

Until Dana came along with her smokes, her passion, and her unshakable honesty; a Hans Christian Andersen mermaid, a real-life fairy tale.

Meantime Paul lay as a substratum of everything in Nina’s life. How many times had they said good-bye? How many times had she called for him? And he had always come to her.

It’s not that I love him now, she told herself. It’s that he needs me now and I must not fail him, as he has never failed me.

“I took out the garbage,” he had told her back then when Jim Strong disappeared. Could Paul’s handiwork ever be discovered in that godforsaken stretch of forest?

Not without help.

Nina wondered why she could never quite get her footing, never have peace in her life. In her balancing act she was constantly shifting weight, never standing still. Perhaps there was no such thing as balance in these terms, not even moments of balance. Maybe humans were all in a log-rolling game on a dangerous river.

Traffic picked up as kids got out of school. She knew she should get off the phone. “I’ll call after the hearing.” She rang off and swung into the parking lot of Caplan, Stamp, and Powell, a mile far from her own digs at the Starlake Building.

Gathering up her bag and slipping her feet out of her snow boots and into her heels, she recalled the first time she had seen these offices. Clicking the remote lock on the car, stepping carefully around puddles, she recalled the glamour and sparkle of the offices, and she recalled her chagrin. She had definitely felt outclassed. Nowadays, although the Caplan firm continued to do well
and enjoyed a good reputation, Nina knew she had come up in the world. She had nothing to apologize for, and a lot to be proud of.

She could handle this chess game.

Punching the buzzer to their offices, she reminded herself to be humble. She didn’t want to antagonize Stamp.

S
he walked down a neutral hallway decorated with huge, surreal Sierra photographic landscapes by Elizabeth or Olof Carmel. While waiting for the elevator, she admired the flaming aspens and rushing, blue, icy waters of a stream. The elevator arrived. She stepped in, sorry she had nothing but a small digital camera, which she mostly used to document Bob’s amazing growth as a human being and Hitchcock’s progress as a dog. Well, she had other strengths.

Michael Stamp’s office proved to be an intimate refuge for predivorcées. She noted the lighting, uplights, downlights, focused lights, so that the room was bathed in a warm golden light she hadn’t thought possible without candles.

Yeah, like gold, she thought, imagining how costly such renovations to an old building such as this one must have been. Then she noticed the overstuffed chairs, the cozy gas fire—and Stamp came to greet her, hand outstretched. “Glad to see you, Nina.”

She shook his hand, inhaling the leather scent of the furniture and the polishes that kept all the wood desks and bookcases satiny and warm-looking.

He sat her down. She didn’t like feeling shorter than she was, so she tried to sit upright, but the plushness of the chair made it impossible. To restore her strength of position, she crossed her legs, letting her skirt ride up. He wouldn’t know who made the shoes, but he would certainly notice them.

“Ahem,” he said, noticing as planned. “So, Nina, to plunge right into why you are probably here, because I’m dying to go home, let me reveal right away that I just got off the horn with the sheriff’s office.”

“Is it presumptuous to ask what you’re going to do at tomorrow’s hearing?”

“You mean, will we maintain the position that Jim Strong is alive until we know with absolute certainty he’s dead? This is a reputable firm and we don’t play games, but it’s a reasonable position. Your own investigator apparently came up empty-handed on his trip there.”

Nina said, “You have to know those affidavits are phony. How can you, in all conscience, push them as authentic?”

Stamp sat behind his cherrywood desk like Buddha, a paragon of equanimity. Behind him, Lake Tahoe, as expansive and beautiful as Nina had ever seen it sprawled through a silvery winter haze. “We don’t know that. If we had reasonable grounds to believe Jim Strong was already dead at the time we were contacted by the attorney in Porto Alegre, of course we’d want nothing to do with a fraud. That’s the short answer.”

Nina took a breath. “Your intervention may cause the sale to fail.”

The other lawyer looked surprised. “We’ll cooperate in every way to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“Mike, what do you think is really going on here? Don’t you care that you’re a dupe?”

Stamp’s cheek twitched. “A dupe? Where’s your evidence that he isn’t alive.”

“Bottom line: we oppose an escrow account for a guy who is dead, as to the share he owns individually, and certainly with regard to tying up the entire net proceeds.”

Stamp smiled. “Meeting of the minds. We’re on the same side in the sense that we don’t like the escrow notion. As you know, we have interviewed with a request is to have the money sent to Brazil. It is not up to us to doubt or to determine the credibility of those affidavits, which are duly executed and have been filed with the court. We don’t want an escrow account any more than you do. We want the proceeds from the sale that are due to Jim Strong to be sent down there to Jim Strong. That’s what we should be working toward.”

“Why do I feel like you’re being disingenuous?” Nina leaned
forward, feeling like a beggar, but willing to do what she needed to do to make her point. “The purchase and sale agreement has to be executed within the next four days. I need your help to make that happen.”

“What exactly do you need from us, Nina?”

“A stipulation. Withdrawal of this false claim.”

He stroked his square jaw. “I’m telling you, we can’t ethically withdraw it. We don’t know Strong’s dead. We have legal documents on file that imply he is alive. All we need from you is for Jim’s proceeds to be sent to Brazil. Then you can have your sale.”

“If Philip Strong has to lose the resort, so be it. But to lose the resort he spent his whole life building, and come out of decades of work without a dime? You’ve played golf with him. Have a heart.”

“Look,” Stamp persisted, “the buyers pony up the sales price. We send Jim his individual share. Everyone’s happy.

“Jim gets four hundred seventeen thousand dollars. Philip Strong takes one and a quarter million, half the net proceeds based on his share. And Marianne and Kelly Strong each receive the same amount as Jim Strong. We give up our claim to all the net, and of course our claim is overreaching a little, and I have even thought, and don’t repeat this, Nina, but I have even thought that it was improper perhaps to object to the sale entirely.”

“I’m almost tempted,” Nina said. “To tell my clients their best bet is to get nicked for more than four hundred thousand dollars. Cost of doing business, right, Mike? You get your nick, a lawyer and a notary in Brazil get their nick, and whoever dreamed this scheme up takes the big money. Who are you really representing?”

Stamp swiveled in his state-of-the-art chair, which made nary a noise. “You know what? It angers me to be accused of fraud by a lawyer who’s so emotionally involved she can’t look at the fact that this asshole she hates may still be around.”

“Mike, what’s going on? Are you involved in this? Tell me, and I’ll help you.”

He stood up. “See you tomorrow.”