McQuaid's Justice

by Carly Bishop

  Cy didn’t even blink, and Amy realized, suddenly, because he wouldn’t look at her, that it was true. “We’re talking about you now, Hollingsworth, and right now, you’re looking at obstruction of justice on one end to stalking and felony menacing on the other.”

  “Make it Zach,” he offered, unfazed. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket and sent Amy a questioning look. “If you don’t mind—”

  “She does.”

  “She,” Amy signed, her hands somehow acerbic, “doesn’t. I am allowed to say that, aren’t I?”

  Cy’s lips tightened. “Say anything damn thing you want, Amy,” he signed, “but not now.” He signed the word for emphasis.

  “Let me just get this one thing straight. I’m the one who defused the situation in the parking lot, and I’m in trouble?”

  “I asked you to stay put.”

  “No, you told me to stay put. My mistake. I guess you would rather have gotten yourself shot up again.”

  “Hmm,” Zach interrupted, wincing visibly, belatedly thumping the pack of cigarettes back down into his shirt pocket. “Stepped right in it that time, didn’t I?” He sat forward, his forearms resting on the table. He had a weathered look, a face that hadn’t aged well, and steady, ordinary brown eyes. “Look. I didn’t mean to cause that kind of trouble. I have information I think you need. I didn’t want to wait for the Feebs to decide I wasn’t just angling for information myself. And frankly, Amy... I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t think McQuaid, here—” he looked at Cy “—would let that happen.” He paused. “Naturally, I’d appreciate whatever leads...insights you care to share.”

  “What information?” Cy asked, still smolderingly pissed at Amy, though no more than she was at him.

  Hollingsworth picked a small tape recorder out of his jacket pocket and put it on the table. “While you two were in the county building, I was on the street in the car. Your brother, Amy, got on a cell phone—which, as you may or may not know, is pretty simple to listen in on.”

  “You want to give us a short synopsis?” Cy asked, finally setting the front legs of his chair back on the floor. “What’s on it?”

  “Brent Reeves dialing up Uncle Perry, reading him the riot act because you and Amy are on the verge of proving Brent killed his mother.”

  Amy’s glance darted between the two men. Skeptical, Cy drained his mug and poured more, angling the mug to minimize the foam. “You’ve got our attention. Let’s hear it.”

  Keeping eye contact with Amy, Zach’s hand closed over the small recorder and he thumbed one of the small buttons. Cy put down his mug, rested his forearms on the table and began to listen intently. Amy had to touch his arm before he remembered she couldn’t hear it.

  He signed, adept now, easily identifying Brent, then Perry for her as the recording played on, closing his hand when one of them stopped and the other began. At the tape’s end, Cy took a deep breath and settled back in his chair, his big hands resting on the table.

  “Interesting listening, huh?” Zach ventured, still trying to humor Cy. “Is he cracking up, or what?”

  Amy shoved her beer away, ignoring Zach. “He’s scared. He knows I remembered what happened when I fell into the mine shaft, and he’s worried I’ll remember more.”

  Cy shook his head. “He’s worried, but your uncle is right. All Brent has to do is hang tough. It’s exactly the same thing you said yesterday. All either one of them has to do is stonewall us long enough and this thing will go away.”

  Zach began drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “This is all pretty interesting in a silent-movie sort of way, but would you guys mind sharing with the signing-impaired?”

  Amy had to smile. “Will you tell him?” she signed, posing the question to Cy, her smile gone.

  “We’re off the record, here. So long as you understand that.”

  Zach shrugged. “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “You know basically what’s going on?”

  “Not when I started this.” Zach took a couple of swallows of beer, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “One of our esteemed leaders on the Senate Judiciary Committee tossed me the Jessup bone. As far as I can tell, Senator Gould would like it—like it a lot—if Judge Reeves’s nomination tanked. He won’t care how it happens—except he obviously wants the judge to go down in public. Then this murder thing opened up. I still want to know why Gould has it in for the judge.”

  Amy shook her head. “I’m not sure I’ve ever even heard of him. Do you know anything about it, Cy?”

  Gnawing on the inside of his lip, Cy frowned and shook his head. “Your father is extremely well connected, Amy. Gould would look like a jackass to openly oppose him.”

  “Well, there’s the rub, huh?” Zach muttered. “He isn’t openly opposing Judge Reeves, but he sure as hell wants his nomination scuttled.” He shrugged. “But look. Here’s what I know.” He began ticking off his fingers. “I know Julia Reeves died under uh...uncertain circumstances. I know who she was, that things weren’t swell between her and the judge. I looked up the public record of the autopsy report. I know Courson, the coroner, called it an accident.” He met Cy’s hard look unflinchingly. “My sources at the DOJ tell me Courson changed his mind, and put that on paper. And now, thanks to this tape, I’m guessing Brent did the deed and old Uncle Perry has been covering his young ass for the last quarter century.”

  “And if you go to press with that,” Cy warned, “Perry Reeves will name you and every publisher you peddle this story to in a libel suit you’re unlikely to forget.”

  “Been there, done that,” Zach said, shrugging.

  “Not with my uncle, you haven’t,” Amy signed, and Cy repeated.

  Zach thumped a crumb of tortilla chip onto the floor. “So are you telling me you don’t remember any of this, Amy? Because from where I sit, you look sweet for the key witness to your mother’s murder.”

  Cy shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Even if she were an eyewitness, even if she saw who did it and how it went down, there is no court in the country that will allow her testimony. She was five years old when it happened. She’d already been traumatized. Her recall twenty-five years later wouldn’t even get into evidence.”

  “Yeah, but does Brent know that? That’s the question.”

  “My uncle does. That’s all that really matters,” Amy signed.

  “Are you telling me if you leaned on Brent right now, he wouldn’t crack wide open?” He looked at them both, then straightened and kited another angle. “Okay. I get it. You two don’t believe Brent did the deed at all. What? Is he taking the fall for Perry? Why would he do that? More important, why would Perry Reeves off his brother’s wife?”

  “That’s your story, Hollingsworth,” Cy conceded. “But since there’s no proof he killed her—or that anyone did, for that matter, it doesn’t really matter what his motive was. You go to press with nothing but idle speculation, then Perry Reeves will bury you alive.”

  “So.” Zach shoved his chair back from the table and rose, leaving his recorder on the table. “If the case is so hopeless, why are you still dogging the thing?”

  NIGHTFALL CAME hours before Cy drove through to the back of Amy’s father’s property, to the small guest house where she lived. He walked her to the door, where her porch light came on automatically.

  “Will you come in?” she signed. “Let me feed you?”

  He leaned up against the stone siding. “You don’t have to do that, Amy.”

  “I want to. I’d like you to stay.” She thought he wanted to stay too, for a while, for reasons other than a brief respite from the road and the relentless pursuit of difficult answers to her past. For easing the tension between them over what she had done in that parking lot.

  He took off his hat. “I eat a hell of a lot.”

  “Good. I make one hell of a boeuf bourguignonne,” she spelled. “French for beef stew. Leftovers, but a lot of it.”

  “I’m sold.”

>   She stood there smiling, so befuddled, suddenly, that she forgot to open the door. He took her keys and opened the door. She shed her coat and hung it up, then took his and hung it next to hers. She couldn’t remember when she’d done that. Hung a man’s coat by hers and liked the way it looked. The way it smelled. She had never cleaned out a drawer or half a closet for a man, but Cy’s coat hanging there pleased her, made her think of more radical things. More intimate adjustments.

  When she turned, she turned into him. He had his arm on the wall, trapping her in such a small way. Her lips parted. Her pulse beat hard beneath her breast.

  She placed her hand on his chest.

  He cupped her nape. His hand was still cold, and she shivered till he eased her head up with his thumb and kissed her. His lips were cold too, at first, but her shivers had more to do with the thrill. With the sensation of his shadow-dark whiskers stabbing her chin, and the pull of his hand through her hair.

  Her lips parted. He took it for an invitation. His tongue touched hers, and the thrill took hold as low as her breasts, as deep, abiding pleasure both pinched and unfurled.

  She felt the shape of her name on his lips, and answered with the breath of his name against his tongue. At some deep, mute level, he understood her attempt and a wildness overtook his holding her.

  She knew it. Got what it meant to him that she would try saying his name. His hand closed tight in her hair, then he broke off his kiss and backed away, way too soon.

  “I wasn’t ready to be done with that, Cy.”

  Shoving his hands into his jeans pockets, which in an instant of startling feminine clarity, she understood for exactly what it was. He cleared his throat. “Me either.”

  “Is that true?”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you, Amy.”

  The thrill moved deeper inside her.

  Chapter Eleven

  She nodded and moved past him, turning on low lights as she went through her small living room, with the burgundy leather couch and deep, white-on-white embroidered club chairs, through the dining room where she lit half a dozen white, jasmine-scented candles, to her kitchen. She pulled out a fat container of leftover bourguignonne and set it to warming on the lighted gas burner.

  Cy had followed her, and sat in one of the chairs at her breakfast nook looking at her arrangement on the wall beside him of small pen-and-ink sketches in a variety of pewter and delicate wrought iron frames.

  “Did you do these?”

  She nodded. “Doodling, really.”

  “I’m no expert, Amy, but these are exquisite.”

  His awe pleased her. “Thank you.”

  “Was that trophy I saw in the living room the design award Fiona was talking about?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it for?”

  “A zoo, actually. Mine was an aviary design. I’ll show you the elevation sketches if you want.”

  He thought she’d signed “elevator.” She laughed, spelling out “elevation.”

  He grinned. “Well, that’s not the worst mistake I’ve ever made.”

  She poured a couple of crystal goblets of wine, then prepared a small platter of sliced cheese and crackers, adding a few capers, sprigs of fresh parsley and tiny red peppers for color.

  He looked as if he couldn’t quite stand touching it, making a mess of her arrangement.

  “It’s only cheese and crackers, Cy,” she signed, teasing. “You should see what I can do with a radish.”

  “Show me.”

  She looked at him, considering, then went to the refrigerator and brought back a large radish. “Trade,” she signed. “Tell me what’s the funniest mistake you’ve made.”

  “Okay. You first.”

  He got over it, and started on the cheese and crackers.

  She began to carve on the radish with a tiny paring knife. In a few moments of deft slices and intricate carving she’d produced a swan between petals of red radish. She held it out to him with a voilà gesture. “Your turn.”

  He shook his head, awed again. “You’ll laugh.”

  “You promised.”

  “Okay. But I don’t know—”

  “Cy, just spit it out,” she demanded.

  “Okay. It was with Seth. I should have taken a clue when he taught me to say my name. Turned out what he taught me was ‘dickhead.’”

  She grinned. “The battle of the deafie and the hearie began.”

  “Exactly. So one day—he’s sixteen now—he’s telling me he’s screwed, only I thought he spelled scrod. He hadn’t ever even heard of scrod. He asked me if scrod was ‘hearie’ for screwed in the past tense. So I’m explaining screwed is already past tense, and he’s following this whole English grammatical thing and he asks, is scrod the verb form in the past perfect tense?

  “I threw up my hands. I don’t even know what the hell past perfect tense is.”

  Now she was awed. “What an incredibly bright kid!”

  Cy nodded. “He knew it too. It got him into trouble all the time. He had some great teachers he could run circles around.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I told him to forget about that. I told him a scrod is a fish that, at the latitude of Boston, is a real delicacy. But the lightbulb comes in Seth’s devious little mind and I can see he’s going to work on this verb thing and I’m thinking, I’m not gonna get it. I’m gonna look like a real moron. He signs, ‘So did you hear the one about the Boston cabdriver?’ I fall right into it, and shake my head, like no, I haven’t heard that one. So he signs, ‘This guy gets in the cab and asks the driver, ”You know where I can get scrod in this town?’” The cabbie says, ‘Mister, I’ve been asked that about a hundred million times, but never in the past perfect subjunctive.’”

  “Wow!” She smiled. “Did you get it?”

  He scowled. “Yeah. Sort of. A couple of beats later.” He looked suddenly very pensive. Forlorn. “That’s how it went with Seth. He needed someone to get it. Someone to admire him. Someone to tell him to knock off playing his video games in the middle of the night.”

  Amy nodded. “He didn’t know they make noise?”

  “Not a clue.”

  She thought about a boy, a sixteen-year-old deafie, so smart he could invent a joke that worked in ASL and English, so innocent and unwitting he didn’t know video could also make sound.

  She thought about all her own small embarrassments, the way the only chance she had stood was to see them for precious, comic, funny moments that made the tragic and unhappy ones endurable—especially now. Especially struggling against all odds to learn what it was she once had heard, once known about her mother’s death.

  She understood with all her heart what a gift Cy and Seth had been to each other. What a gift Cy was to her, right now. “You’re a hearie with a deaf-heart, Cy McQuaid.”

  She got up to serve him her piping hot stew in an antique ceramic tureen. The beef and burgundy wine scent steamed into the air, rich as the moment Cy also got what she meant dubbing him a deaf-heart.

  IN HER FATHER’S courtroom late the following day, the attorneys for the government were lined up at a table to one side, like birds on a wire, those for the defendant on the other side, facing them. The afternoon sun slanted steeply from the west.

  She knew from the way her father held his shoulders that he had listened as long as he was willing. He would have read the stacks of documents submitted on appeal, not once, but many times.

  He would know the case inside and out. Better than the attorneys for either side. In her own experience, when he knew better than you, you usually knew it, so if the attorneys were paying attention, the oral arguments were very nearly done.

  She had no doubt that her father had seen her when she slipped inside the courtroom with Cy. Still, he had given no indication. When she was very little, if she had been very quiet until he was done and the courtroom cleared, he would let her come sit in his chair and preside over his pleadings. She would bang the gavel to her heart’s delight, bu
t always, always, in her little universe and the courtroom she ran, her daddy’s impassioned arguments carried the day.

  Of course, the case usually boiled down to who loved her best—her daddy or her March Hare.

  Her daddy always won.

  He looked bone-weary to her. And older than she remembered him looking less than a month ago when he had come home to Denver for Christmas. He spent a couple of moments poring over his calendar after he’d cut off the last of the oral arguments, then announced when he would render his decision. He rapped his gavel and was gone from the bench and the courtroom before the bevy of attorneys all came to their feet.

  Amy got up with Cy and left by the side exit to avoid the crowd, then keyed in the code to open a door, marked Private, off the narrow corridor. Through a second door, they entered her father’s chambers. The judge finished hanging up his robe, then turned to embrace her.

  She inhaled his warmth, the scent of his aftershave, the powerful, commanding essence she had always associated with him. “Daddy,” she signed against his grizzled cheek.

  “Amy.” She both felt the familiar vibration of her name in his chest, and his hand, spelling her name against her cheek. The ritual was old between them, small comfort in the beginning, more necessary, more cherished every year since she had gone deaf. He pulled back for her to see on his lips what he said. “You should have called. I’d have had my driver pick you up.” He turned his gaze on Cy, offered his hand. “We’ve met, Mr. McQuaid.”

  Cy extended his hand to shake. “I’m surprised you remember, sir.”

  “What was the occasion?” Amy asked, more surprised that they had ever met.

  Her father hadn’t stopped taking Cy’s measure. “Some D.C. soiree or other.”

  “One of Candy Orenthal’s, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes. That’s right.”

  Amy shot her father a warning look. “Don’t bother, Daddy. You know exactly.”

  “A bit off my game, am I?” He shot her a rueful look. “Just an old man’s vanity. No strokes today, however.” He turned away and sat at his desk. Behind him, dark, mahogany-stained oak bookshelves stretched the length of the room.