Perfectly Criminal

by Celeste Marsella

  “Not me,” Beth said. “I wouldn't give him the right time of day. I may have a different way of doing things than you, but I'd let him come to me. I'd stay quiet, Shannon, and let him get a little nervous at your silence. Let him come beg you for information. And he'll know you've got it, because soon it'll be all over the news that you and I were with Doogie when she… died.”

  Beth was thinking more clearly than me, and I was happy for it. Truth is, I was always worried Beth wouldn't make it as a valuable member of our little AG legal team.

  She was proving me wrong, and I was glad. “You're right,” I said. “I'm not thinking straight today. This emotional shit is for the birds. It fuzzies up my brain.”

  “‘Fuzzies’?” Beth said. “Even your language is sprouting little smiley faces. You sure you're okay?”

  “It fucks up my brain. Is that better?”

  “Well, yeah. It makes me feel more secure—especially after what we just witnessed—that the world is still right and spinning on its proper axis.”

  “Well, then, let me make you even more secure. Scott Boardman met Leo Safer right before the murders. Maybe Scott told Leo he was going straight to the boat to see his wife. Maybe Leo Safer knew more than we think he did and could actually have proved something, so Scotty boy eliminated him on the boat with me that day, and then shot himself in the arm for good measure.”

  “What about Brooke? Was she with Scott Boardman that night too, or not?”

  “Getting that story straight from Scott and her is like picking petals off a daisy. She was with him; she wasn't with him; she was with him; she wasn't with him. But we'll keep plucking away at the flower girl until she's stripped bare and blowing naked in the wind.”

  Beth smiled. “You're going to be fine, Shannon. Just fine.”

  About five minutes from the AG parking lot, where Beth was dropping me to pick up my car, my cell phone vibrated a silent ring. “It's Vince,” I said, flipping the phone open and bringing it to my ear.

  “I just got a call from the Newport cops. Having a busy day?” he said.

  “You betcha,” I answered back. “You want us in?” “No, go home, both of you. We'll talk in the morning. Try as I might, I can't see you did anything wrong this time. The Booth woman called Beth for a meeting, right? Of course, you didn't have to accompany her against my orders, but I could see why Beth would want a lawyer on hand.”

  “Who told you Virginia Booth called Beth?” “Your buddies, trying to save both your asses. Is Beth surviving?”

  “Since when do you give a crap?” “Your girlfriends are worried. They didn't call you?” “Matter of fact, no. Which leads me back to my initial question: What do you really want, Vince? Beth's welfare isn't it, and you know I know it.”

  He answered with another question. “You're going home for the night, right?”

  “I was planning on it, but you want to pay me overtime, I'll come up and fill you in.”

  “Lynch, lately you're not even worth your regular pay. Jeff sent over some paperwork in the Cohen case you lost He gave me some good zingers on my decision to let him go last year and keep you on. Don't make me change my mind.”

  “Nighty night, Vince,” I said without a fight. “I'm beat.” We managed to hang up on each other simultaneously as Beth pulled up next to my Suburban. I could tell she was preparing some parting speech laced with a missionary's offer of help for my tortured soul, so I cut her off before she dished out an emotional soup of solace and support, whereupon I'd have to beat her back into a pre-Doogie-suicide manner of dealing with me. “Forget about what happened today, Beth. Okay? Don't torture me with it. I'll deal.”

  “Are you going to tell Laurie and Marianna?” “Nothing to tell, but I'm sure we'll revisit it over a bottle of Captain Morgan's spiced rum at next year's Christmas party while we're all throwing up in some Downcity alley. Have a good night. See you in the a.m.”

  IT WAS ALREADY PAST EIGHT WHEN BETH DROVE out of the office lot. I unlocked my Suburban, boarded the driver's seat, and started my engine. The headlights shot on, illuminating the parked and shiny black Cadillac SRX bearing the vain and chimerical license plate “VP.”

  Vince rarely stayed in the office past six. I switched off the engine and hopped out of my truck. That Vince's car was still in the lot could have meant nothing more than he'd met someone for dinner who'd picked him up and given him a ride. But his car still parked at the office, and the fact that he'd called to pinpoint Beth's and my whereabouts—and told us twice not to come back to the office—led me to suspicions too vivid to ignore.

  I unlocked the AG back door with my set of keys. The elevators to our floor were likewise locked. I punched the up button and the doors spread open immediately, whereupon I inserted a special key unlocking only the entry to our office floor and the elevator responded by slamming closed and taking me up. When the doors opened to our floor, I followed a path of light to the conference room door, underneath which a sliver of blue fluorescence escaped into the dark hall. My ear to the door yielded silence, though I thought I heard some muffled breathing that could have been whispering, hushed voices, or the air-conditioning unit sputtering on and off. It also could have been someone working late, but because I was so intimately familiar with everyone on our team, I knew I was on sounder ground by assuming the live presence of something illicit under way, behind closed doors.

  I didn't try the door, knowing the slightest sound of my hand turning the knob would quiet the already hushed voices within. But I knelt by the narrow opening at the base of the door and listened until my knees gave way and I sat against the door. Boredom was setting in when I heard a woman's giggle, and then another, and then Vince's gruff voice oddly edged in a lilting swirl.

  I smelled cigarettes. And then the clink of a glass.

  Jesus, was this just one of Vince's dates? Some pathetic female so desperate for attention that she'd let Vince hide her in a conference room because he couldn't or didn't want to be seen with her in public? Was all this private candlelit poppycock just a penned-in soiree between the Pig and his pig?

  I was getting ready to rise and leave when I heard the faintest whisper of a familiar name. A name that had been on the tip of my tongue for the past two weeks. A name that kept popping up like a jack-in-the-box no matter how I tried to keep my hands off the crank.

  It was Scott's idea, the voice said.

  Scott.

  I rammed my hand against the door in a vicious rap and then tugged on the locked handle and turned with all my strength. “Who's in there?” I heard my voice thunder through the dark hall. “Open the goddamn door!”

  What did I expect to find? Or more precisely who? By then I'd already erased the memory of Vince's car still parked in the lot. Familiar-sounding voice notwithstanding, it couldn't be Vince. Vince was at dinner, of course, not there, locked in the AG conference room discussing an open case with some dingbat broad. This was not Vince's MO. He may have been deficient in socially acceptable vocabulary, good looks, and the proper way to hold a knife, but professional integrity he was full of. Or he was full of shit, and all the privacy, responsibility, and confidentiality crap he'd been espousing and spouting off about for the past six years was just so much… bull.

  “Open the door,” I screamed again to the room, now hushed in a conspiratorial silence. “Open it or I'll break the fucking lock. And it won't be the first door I've kicked down today.”

  “Lynch,” I heard Vince say, “I told you to go home. We'll talk in the morning.”

  “Vince? Who's in there?”

  The female voice giggled and Vince shushed her.

  He came to the closed door. “Lynch, go home,” he said in a calming conversational tone. And then he whispered, “I'm on top of this.”

  “I'll just bet you are, Vince. Move away from the door—”

  I could hear him move away, his voice more distant. “If you break this door down, so help me, Lynch, I'll fire your ass for good this time.”

&nb
sp; “I don't think so, Vince. I think once I get in there and knock some sense into you, you'll be giving me a raise.”

  “Shit,” I heard him mumble. “Wait,” he said to me, and I heard him walk away, say a few undecipherable words to the lady-in-waiting, and then return to the door and click the deadbolt. Slowly the door opened under Vince's power.

  My mouth hung open, speechless again. What was happening to me? Vince could have shot me through the head with his own gun and laid me on a table next to Virginia Booth, who had recently joined Pat Boardman and Muffie Booth in the morgue down the block, because there at the table, leaning back against the stiff-backed conference room chair with her hair tumbling at her shoulders, was the lovely Brooke Stanford, smiling at me as if she were back on the job full-time and had just replaced me as the sitting authority on all things worth knowing.

  Vince remained on the threshold, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, a mist of sweat on the ruddy forehead of his flushed face, his tie missing in action, and his shirt opened at the neck, revealing a hideous gold cross dangling amid the dense hair of his sun-deprived olive-green skin. But the gray-specked chest curls tickling the Pig's throat were not my main concern. What grabbed my attention were the red tresses of the girl sitting at the long conference table, whose shoeless feet were tucked comfortably under her silk-stockinged legs, and whose familiar Chanel pumps lay askew on the floor next to her as if they'd been kicked off at separate yet well-timed intervals, either before or after a tickle and frolic from my erstwhile respected if not revered boss, Attorney General Vince Piganno.

  If I expected an explanation from either of them, I was sorely disappointed, because the three of us stood rooted in place—Vince midway between Brooke and me, and me still standing just outside the door—until Brooke emitted another of her nauseating little burps of amusement. She leaned over to display a decent amount of unbridled cleavage and retrieved her shoes from their asundered positions on the floor, and then, pointedly flexing her toes ballerina-style, she slipped the shoes on her dainty feet.

  “Don't go anywhere,” Vince said, looking at me, but somehow talking to someone else. I looked around the room for another participant in the tawdry scene, but it was not until Brooke flicked those high-fashioned shoes off her feet again that I realized Vince's words had been meant for her. I was still the intruder—the uninvited one—the one who deserved no other explanation but the dry and lifeless words that came next from Vince's worried frown: “Go home, Lynch. You've had a rough day. The press will be at our doors first thing in the morning for an official statement. I need you prepared for the damage-control phase of Virginia Booth's suicide.”

  There are times when explanations are necessary in the very moment they are sought, and there are other times, like the present, that an excuse for one's poor choices could wait for the church confessional, or a witness stand, or just before the executioner's saline drip begins its course through your condemned veins. As difficult it was sans explanation, I backed away from the doorway, knowing instinctively that even if Vince decided to offer an excuse for his inexcusable behavior, it would certainly not be forthcoming that evening while Brooke remained in his presence, shoeless, smiling, and with what I now noticed was a long-stemmed glass of white wine pressed hard against her lipstick-smeared kisser.

  I could have buzzed up the girls that very evening during my drive home to apprise them of the Pig's dirty little rendezvous with Brooke Stanford, but with no explanation myself, either from Vince or one I'd conjured up in a spiteful rage, what would be the point in intruding on their evening meal with such nauseating news? On the brighter side, seeing Vince enjoying an evening snack on Brooke in the AG conference room had somehow pushed the day's spine-tingling events at least temporarily to the back of my mind. During the drive to my loft, the phone I'd fought hard to keep tucked away in my pocket, to avoid spreading the newest nasty Vince gossip, began to ring of its own accord. Well, not entirely. Beth had helped it along with her nimble little fingers.

  I flipped it open. “Yup?” I answered. And expecting her comforting wish for my good night's sleep, I quickly added, “I'm fine, Beth. Go to sleep. I'll see you in the morning.” But before she could sprinkle the sandman's dust into my eyes, “Nope,” she answered. “Not so soon.”

  I was readying to flip my phone closed, regretting I'd answered it to begin with, when another voice took to the airwaves: “Hey,” Laurie said. “It's me. The Fez. Now. One nightcap. Bye.”

  I had free choice. The four of us did—always—with no hard feelings, but I tucked my cell back into my pocket and veered left toward one of the darker Down-city alleys that would take me straight to hell—aka the Red Fez.

  THE BIG GIRLS

  IT HAD BEEN A YEAR SINCE I'D BEEN TO THE FEZ. Nothing appeared changed except the muck that seemed to be burgeoning like a mushroom in the dank, dark place. The Fez walls, once painted a shiny red, had slowly darkened to a bronzed rust, coated by a patina of cooking grease and pre-smoking-ban clotted fumes. The wide-plank pine floor, once pale, was now a neutral shade of gray, with the added virtue of being slip-proof from sticky grime.

  The low-watt ceiling fixtures swayed drunkenly against the breeze of a new ceiling fan, and the Fez owners had done away with menus in favor of posting the daily fare on a chalkboard over the bar, requiring diners to leave their seats and crowd the bar to read the nightly specials. But most of the clientele were jaded regulars who'd either memorized the offerings by damned heart or demanded the tired-looking waitress to either recite the information or suffer gratuity deprivation.

  My dim view of the place notwithstanding, I knew where to find the girls even in bad lighting. I headed straight to the bar in back, where Joe, another year older but arrested in the prepubescent stage of pockmarked greasy skin, still held the title of managing bartender despite the fact that he was the only one.

  I mounted the empty stool at the end, where, without a word to the girls, I ordered a Glenlivet neat. “Open up a new bottle, Joe. I want to hear the seal break.”

  “It ain't watered down,” he said, standing with his head crooked to the side, a slimy strand of yellowed-blond hair falling over the receding hairline of his balding head. Up and down in a nervous tic, he rubbed one of his hands on the side of his apron. “You ain't been here in a dog's age and you walk in here giving me grief right off.”

  “If it's not watered down, it's stale. Open a new bottle, please, Joe. I've had a rough day.”

  Marianna threw a twenty-dollar bill on the bar. “That's your tip, Joe, okay? Open it for her, and we'll all have a glass. Except make mine on the rocks.”

  “And mine with soda and ice,” Laurie said.

  Joe then looked at Beth, knowing there'd be yet one more change to the order. “I'll have the same as Laurie except with lime… and vodka… and hold the scotch.”

  “Oh, come on, Beth,” Marianna snapped. “Just this once?”

  She shook her head petulantly. “You know I've had somewhat of a bad day myself. I don't see why just this once I can't order my own drink like a big girl.”

  I leaned forward on the bar. “She's been acting like this all day,” I explained. “It must be the law school acceptance. She's starting to act like an asshole.”

  “Like one of us,” Marianna added.

  “Beth, we thought we knew ye,” Laurie said in a Brooklyn-accented Irish brogue.

  “Nothing is sacred,” Marianna said to Beth. “Tell us about Virginia Booth. Maybe your good nature died with her.”

  “Some of my innocence did, I can tell you,” Beth said. “Doogie was a rock, like that Prudential Insurance ad. She was what everyone refers to as ‘good stock.’ Doogie was where you went when you had problems. And she could usually dispense some good old-fashioned wisdom and you'd come away feeling rooted in something strong and healthy. For her to take her life like that is—well, it's anathema to everything she stood for.”

  I was assuming, since Marianna's lead question was posited to B
eth and related to Virginia Booth's death, that Beth had said nothing about my childhood revelation. In the past I would have expected nothing less from Beth than a single-minded respect of one's privacy. But who knew this new pre-law Beth; who knew what she was brewing to become? She may have held the mistaken belief that copying the three of us was a noble aspiration. Hah!

  A few more comments and questions about Virginia Booth's suicide from both Laurie and Marianna, and I was certain my secret was safe: Neither had even alluded to my awakened memory of my mother's death. Not that I had any particular interest in hiding my past from my friends, but it was nice to know the secret was still mine to do with as I wished. And that Beth was still… Beth.

  “I got a call from Jeff Kendall today,” Marianna announced in a brief post-Virginia Booth lull. “He asked for you, Shannon, but Andy sent the call to my line when he couldn't find you. Jeff said to tell you that all worries about the Leo Safer murder are over for you—as if you were ever really worried about being charged—and he claims that Miss Brooke is hiring him to represent her in a potential perjury charge—filing that false police statement. Jeff said Vince sent Brooke to him. Vince has been recommending Jeff to a lot of people lately. He sent him for you too, Shannon, didn't he?”

  Laurie said, “Vince knows Jeff, so he feels secure with him. Who better to represent the other side than someone who was once on yours?”

  “But why Brooke?” Marianna asked. “Does Vince even like her since she became such an AG liability?”

  The answer to that question was a no-brainer. “I think Vince likes Brooke even more since the false statement problem. Because he can justifiably fire her, and then be free to fuck her brains out.”

  The silence that followed was kind of fun. I loved being the bearer of shocking news. Little did I know that the shock would still be mine.

  Laurie raised her brows at Marianna, and they both leaned over to me. Marianna was the one who spoke. “Vince and Brooke? I don't think so, Shannon. I think you need a good night's sleep.”