by Lia Matera
The Smart Money
A Laura Di Palma Mystery
Lia Matera
1
My cousin Hal had just moved into a condemned bungalow near the jetty. Everyone else had deserted the development when the foundations cracked and dunes began reclaiming the thoroughfares, so Hal’s kerosene lanterns provided the only glimmer of light on the wind-flogged cul-de-sac. He had none of the amenities there—no heat, no water, no company but scrambling sand fleas and other hungry pests. But apparently it suited him to keep his staples in glass jars, knowing that rodents and roaches scratched at them like the little match girl at the window.
I stood at the threshold of his hovel. In the lantern light, I could see boarded-up windows, a sand-choked porch, and exterior walls veined with wet cracks. Behind the house, on the opposite shore of the bay, the old nuclear power plant glowed like a neon dinosaur. My hometown.
“Hotshot fucking lawyer.” My cousin regarded me with undisguised disgust. “Opening an office in the backwater just so you can stick it to your ex-husband.”
“That about sums it up.” The wind whipped sand around my ankles, and I could feel my shoulder muscles knot with the cold. “I’m freezing, Hal.”
He motioned for me to enter, then preceded me down a drafty hallway. His sweater was too short and his corduroy pants were threadbare at the seat.
Henry Di Palma, Jr., had once favored button-down shirts and stiffly pressed jeans. Dozens of them still hung in the cedar-paneled closets of his father the mayor’s house.
In Hal’s living room, three lanterns flickered near a slashed easy chair, and a fire battled the river of cold air whistling down the fireplace flue. Hal had been sitting there doing nothing, I guess. There were no books or papers beside the chair, just a jam jar with the dregs of red wine.
I found a wooden chair and brushed it off, wrinkling my nose at the dirt that clung to my palm.
“Cleaning lady must have missed a spot,” Hal commented.
I sat down and took a good look at him: glowering brows, deep lines from cheekbone to dimpled chin; eyes set in a perpetual wince; salt-and-pepper hair that had suffered an impatient and inexpert haircut, self-inflicted. “Whatever it takes to keep the family away?”
“At least I don’t go out of my way to kick them in the behind.”
“Don’t waste your sympathy on my ex-husband. He deserves it.” My high-school sweetheart, Gary Gleason, had the town’s public defender contract. I was going to take it away from him, and I was going to enjoy doing it. “I’m just opening up an office. The city doesn’t have to accept my bid.”
“Except that you’re famous.”
“There is that.”
A year earlier, I’d defended a man called Wallace Bean, who’d shot and killed two Republican senators as they stepped off a chartered jet. I’d managed to assemble that one-in-a- million jury with enough regard for expert testimony to acquit Bean by reason of insanity. The nation—especially the conservatives who’d rallied behind the senators’ “bombs for victory” approach to the Vietnam War—had been outraged; but my career had been made. Time, Newsweek, and other national magazines had carried lengthy articles about the trial—and, inevitably, about me.
“But I’m not exactly popular, Hal.”
My hometown was redneck conservative—loggers, fishermen, cannery workers, dairymen. Its citizens doubtless disapproved of what the President had called “an abortion of justice.” On the other hand, I was a celebrity in a town where people still talked about the time Robert Goulet had stayed overnight at the Hillsdale Inn.
I smiled at my cousin. “All in all, I’d say the smart money’s on me.”
Hal stroked his jaw—surprisingly clean-shaven—with a long, callused hand. “Well, I happen to like my money the way I like my women: easy.”
I glanced around the room. Dust balls scampered across the floor, wood crates did duty as tabletops, broken pieces of furniture glowed in the fire. “I don’t see much evidence of either around here.”
“No regrets about Bean? Just one more crazy on the street?”
“A medical review board decided my client was sane. I didn’t make that decision.”
“But you represented him—”
“At the sanity hearing? Of course I did. That’s my job.” The state attorney general had argued against me: How can a man be crazy in May and sane in April? And an acerbic psychiatrist had replied, How can the governor gut the mental health budget and still expect us to provide years of inpatient care? “It wasn’t me who put Bean back on the street.”
“So you’ll take the credit, but not the blame?”
“Something like that.” A damp draft chilled my legs. I tugged the hem of my skirt over my knees. “Why the hermit routine, Hal?”
He smiled, his expression—except for his eyes—suddenly rather sweet. “Didn’t the family tell you?”
“You use the war as an excuse to be a self-destructive, ungrateful bum.”
“Indulge in an ‘I told you so,’ if you want.” Hal lowered his eyelids, transforming his smile into a smirk.
I’d been vociferously horrified when Hal hadn’t resisted the draft … and almost gratified to hear he’d come back from Vietnam moody and waspish. I’d only seen him twice since then. In 1981, I ran into him in Golden Gate Park. He looked haggard and filthy. He told me he hadn’t been home in six years. In the winter of 1983, I found him outside my apartment wielding a greasy wrench. He stayed a few days, just long enough to repair his coughing old van. He seemed more relaxed, even amusing in a dry, offhand way. But he wouldn’t tell me where he’d been living or what he’d been doing. I didn’t mention Hal’s visits to our family, as I couldn’t say he’d looked a bit prosperous, or even happy. From what I gathered, Hal hadn’t contacted them in the two years since. He’d simply appeared at the abandoned development one day last week.
“You know how long the war’s been over, Hal? More than ten years.” Long enough for me to get divorced; run off to the big city; finish college and law school; clerk for a state supreme court justice; put in a year with the U.S. attorney, criminal division; and join the cream of San Francisco law firms, White, Sayres & Speck. “What’s this really about? Why the TV-movie torment?”
“Please. Spare me your philippics.”
“And you’ll spare me yours?”
Hal laced his fingers behind his head and looked me over. I leaned back in my chair and let him look. My pale olive skin had aged well—no wrinkles at thirty-three—and most men admired my wide-set black eyes and full lips too much to hold my largish nose against me. My belted suit accentuated a small waist, and probably cost more than all Hal’s possessions put together. My dainty shoes would cover a month’s rent for a three-bedroom house in our mud hole of a town. And my hair, once a wild mass of curls, had been tamed into a damned expensive, side-parted bob. If I didn’t look like a competent and very successful lawyer, it wasn’t my fault.
“I liked you better when you looked like Mowgli,” was my cousin’s verdict.
“You’re behind the times, Hal. This is how we dress in the jungle nowadays.’’
“So why come back here? You always hated the rain.”
“You just told me. To stick it to my ex-husband.”
He shook his head. “So you get the goddamned public defender’s contract, and Gleason scrambles a little. He’ll get by; he always has.”
“Don’t bet on it!” I was surprised to hear the venom in my tone. I’ve had a lot of practice keeping anger out of my voice (“With all due respect, Your Honor …”). I changed the subject. “Are you coming to my office-warming party?”
�
��My parents going to be there?”
“What do you think?” Not a word from them in the years they’d considered me “loose” for running off to San Francisco, but they’d been in the aisles with their cameras when I graduated from law school.
“I think I have a previous engagement.” The firelight accentuated the harsh creases in Hal’s cheeks.
“And I think you’ve worn out the war as an excuse.”
“Any suggestions for a better one?”
I indicated his surroundings. “Shame that your daddy rammed this boondoggle down the planning commission’s throat?”
He sat up abruptly. “Laura, my dear, you should be grateful to my daddy the mayor. He had to put your ex- husband in the hospital to build this little bit of hell.”
“Every cloud has its silver lining, Hal.”
Hal rested his forearms on his knees. “What did Gleason do to you, anyway?”
“It’s something he’s going to do for me.” There was still a whisper of wrath in my voice, but only a whisper. “Once he sees that nothing else will get me out of town.”
Fire shadows capered over the bare walls and cobwebbed ceiling. Hal’s voice was unusually quiet. “Gleason coming to your office-warming?”
“I’d say so. He wouldn’t want to appear ungracious.”
“So you did invite him.”
“Why, Hal! There’s no one I’d rather see there.”
2
I hung my jacket in the hall closet and tried to stifle that buried-alive feeling I always get when I see the gilt rococo mirrors and satin floral settees that are fixtures in the mansion my father shares with Hal’s parents. My father has been a widower for thirty years, but he and I and a housekeeper always lived in the house my mother had chosen for us. It wasn’t until I got married that my father sold the brick bungalow and moved in with his second cousin, my “Uncle” Henry.
I found Papa in his study, feet, in gleaming black shoes, crossed on the desk atop his account books. His black hair was sleekly combed and his jowly face dignified as he stared out the window, smoking a tiny cigar. He was a short powerful man with a large pug nose, a firm fleshy face, and cunning short-lashed eyes.
“I’ve been to see Hal,” I told him.
He dropped his feet to the floor. “‘Hal’! My cousin’s name isn’t good enough for his son?”
“Henry, then.” I didn’t feel like fighting the battle of the name for Hal again. At age sixteen my cousin had begun to insist his contemporaries call him Hal. (Years later, I read Henry IV, Part I, and finally got the joke.) He also refused to touch his birthday present—a brand- new Fiat Spider I’d have killed for.
Papa shook his head and muttered, “He lives in a slum when he could live in a palace.”
A slight exaggeration. The “Mayor’s Residence” (easy to think of it as my Uncle Henry’s own house, since he’d been mayor for twenty-seven years) was a ten-bedroom mock Swiss chalet, ludicrously out of keeping with the town’s bungalows and Victorians. But it was certainly no palace, in spite of having been pretentiously overdecorated at the taxpayers’ expense.
“I don’t think Aunt Diana appreciates his, um, rough charm.” The understatement of the year. Hal’s mother had nothing but disdain for those less shallow, wealthy, and insincere than herself. The town Babbitts appreciated her unbridled ambition and ostentatious display of wealth, but those attributes weren’t particularly desirable in a mother, not if you happened to be an antisocial pauper like Hal.
“Anyway, Hal—Henry—is too old to live at home.”
Papa stubbed out his cigar, brushing ashes off his vest. “He’s too old to live like a gypsy, you mean.”
“I rented a house today.”
Papa’s nostrils flared but he said nothing; a victory for me that he considered it useless to remonstrate. We both knew my Aunt Diana would speculate that I lived alone to entertain men, a proposition that would be unbearable to my papa if I lived to be a hundred. He was still struggling to accept my divorce. He told me at the time—told me until I stormed out of town—that boys will be boys, and a wife should understand the ways of the world.
“A Victorian on Clarke,” I continued.
Papa was startled. I carefully checked my smile. That three-block strip of Victorians had been restored to look like fern bars, with oak floors and beveled windows. It was as pricey as the town got, and it was where my ex-husband kept house with his girlfriend, Kirsten Strindberg. In fact, my new house, a drafty six-bedroom, was directly across the street from my ex-husband’s.
My Aunt Diana stepped into the room. She was a tall woman with high arched brows, a long thin nose, and a tiny chin she tucked down into a plump neck. She greeted me with cold cordiality. That morning she’d suggested that I let her and my uncle host my office-warming party. (“It doesn’t look good for a young girl to put herself forward.”) My snub had, of necessity, been forceful, and Aunt Diana had decided to punish me by remembering “other plans.”
“Shall I have them set a place for you at dinner?” my aunt inquired.
“I have to be somewhere at seven,” I lied. “Sorry.”
“Dieting?” She sniffed, regarding my trim figure. “They say that after thirty a woman has to choose between her face and her figure.”
Equally daunting options, in my aunt’s case.
I spent most of the evening driving around town. For fourteen years, I’d associated Hillsdale with feeling trapped, understimulated, suffocated by my family, and—worst of all—shamed by my husband. Now I drove the streets and found that the place hardly even looked familiar. It was just a sprawling Pacific Northwest town smothered in gray drizzle, with big square houses on big square lots, wide streets with high curbs and huge storm drains, a lot of muddy hills and gullies, and a fishy smell from the redeveloped marina. The occasional metal hitching post could still be seen poking through a damp sidewalk, and the flophouses near the boat basin had been repainted and marked with historical plaques. After the cramped bustle of San Francisco, there was something rather grand about the well-tended old neighborhoods, with their dripping rhododendrons and giant rose bushes. I remembered the five-foot skunk cabbages in the gully behind my old house. I hadn’t thought of them in years.
I parked my car in front of the house I’d just rented. I turned up the heater and stared across the street. My ex-husband’s house was a two-story Victorian with a domed roof. It looked cared for, painted tan with rust-and-navy trim. A green Peugeot was cozily tucked into the gingerbread carport. Red and purple rhododendrons were in flower, the lawn was neat, the porch was hung with huge planters of fuchsia.
I wondered where Lennart Strindberg was buried, whether his grave was as manicured as my ex-husband’s lawn. But Kirsten probably preferred to tend to the living.
The living. I supposed my plan was clever; it was the best I could do under the circumstances. But it was only a half measure. It wasn’t a bomb; it wasn’t a knife in the ribs.
I remembered Kirsten’s nasty little habit of getting Lennart to fetch and carry for her, of making her round little doll’s face look plaintive as she said, “Len, more coffee for everyone?” or “Len, could you get the groceries?”
Lennart Strindberg, six feet four, translucent white skin over pronounced cheekbones and a delicate nose, hair the color and consistency of corn silk, long-fingered hands, faraway gray eyes, and an unhappy set to his too-wide mouth: Lennart Strindberg was the handsomest man in the world, I had thought.
And he’d fetched and carried for Kirsten, quietly, so quietly. I’d never seen him pause or hesitate. “No” had not been in his lexicon.
Kirsten used to chide me in Gary’s presence. “You spoil Gary!” she’d exclaim coyly when she learned I’d done some simple thing for him. Then she’d narrow her eyes and add, ‘Td beat him into shape fast enough.” And Gary would respond with an “Oh, would you?” grin.
Lennart Strindberg told me, the very last time I saw him, that Kirsten hated to be obeyed, that it made her feel unwomanly.
“Then why do you do it?”
Lennart had shrugged. “Good manners are most necessary when they are not appreciated.”
Lennart Strindberg. All these years I’d thought of him as a living, breathing human being. All these years I’d wondered if we’d ever meet again, if he’d ever change his mind about me—“wise up,” as it were.
And all these years, Lennart Strindberg had been dead.
Dead so long that Kirsten and Gary probably thought of him only rarely, thought of him with little guilt and less remorse.
But I would change that. Indeed I would.
3
The office-warming was going well.
I’d bought a great deal of expensive champagne, and I was doing my best to charm magistrates and judges, the ones who informally advised the county whom to select for public defender.
I let my Uncle Henry lead me around the room, introducing me to people I already knew. Uncle Henry was short and barrel-chested, like my father, with the same dark, firm skin and sleek black hair. But my Uncle Henry wore an expression of false candor, of goodwill, that my father could never, nor would ever need to, feign.
Uncle Henry was in a good mood that afternoon, slapping backs and telling jokes that would have made my Aunt Diana tight-lipped with disapproval.
I was standing with our congressman, a bloated bald man with a squashed strawberry of a nose. I was defending—for the thousandth time—“TV syndrome,” a phrase I’d coined during Wallace Bean’s trial. Bean had been hooked on the type of television fare that glamorized violence and intrigue, that showed one brave man breaking the rules, beating the system, changing history. When he stepped in front of the airplane steps with his forty-five, Bean saw himself as the savior of liberalism, the avenger of dead draftees, the man who would purge America’s psyche of an unjust war.
Bean’s jury hadn’t based its insanity verdict on the TV-syndrome defense, though. That had been a fallback argument: Even if Bean was insane, I’d asserted, he’d been too confused by television violence-for-a-good-cause to realize that his actions were antisocial or wrong.
