by Faye, Amy
1
With the grisly death of her father, Diana Kramer had a lot on her plate. There had already been calls from all her professors, telling her that she didn't have to come in. There had been calls from her boss, telling her that she did, but it would be fine to take a day or two. There had already been calls from Dad's agent, as well, offering his sincerest consolations.
There was a hint in Jeremy's voice that she had other things to talk to him about, as well, but whatever they were, Jeremy wasn't saying, and Diana wasn't ready to have any particular conversation about her father's work.
He'd been an artist his whole life, and like most artists, he'd made about enough to get by. Unlike most of them, he spent most of that life avoiding sucking up to the sort of people who pay big dollar sums for art. Most people were mediocre artists, but good salesmen. If you lived the lifestyle well enough, nobody would bother to question how good the art was.
People bought art for all sorts of reasons. Most people, they buy it because there's an empty space on their wall where something ought to be, so they fill it with a photo of the New York City skyline, or a reproduction Monet or Van Gogh. Big names, or obvious pictures. There was nothing wrong with that, as far as Diana was concerned.
Dad seemed to think differently about it. Then again, he seemed to think differently about quite a number of things, given that he lived most of his life away from other people. Diana had gotten used to it, but the minute that there was a chance to leave, she did.
Diana had always dreamed of the sort of places that people on the internet talked about, places where there were thousands of people running around at any given time, and it wasn't a four-mile trek to go see the nearest house. She had run to them and now it was looking like there were fewer and fewer reasons to ever go back.
The ranger's service assured her that there were people looking into her father's death, which she supposed was good enough. It had to be good enough. She wasn't a cop, and she didn't know anything about cops. She knew that they looked pretty good in uniform, in spite of her best knowledge. They came dangerously close to being in trouble on a regular basis. Those were things everyone knew, though.
The other thing she knew was that they came to know how crime scenes were 'supposed' to look, and that they had seemed very upset when she went to identify the body. There wasn't much to identify, if she were really being honest.
After all, in order to identify a body you had to be able to see the face, at least a little, Diana supposed. That, or some identifying clothing, or something. But he had shirts, same as anyone. They tended towards heavy-weight clothes designed for hiking and backpacking, because that was the sort of thing that Dad did when he wasn't painting. The truth was, he spent most of his time not painting.
It was something that no doubt disturbed and surprised people, because when you're a painter, you're supposed to be a certain way. You're supposed to be prone to flights of fancy, and tend towards girlishness. You're supposed to be an artistic type, highly emotional, and so on.
Dad was never any of those things, either. He was just who he was, and nothing more. He was tall, and if anything he was like Hemingway, terse and masculine and hard to approach from any of the usual directions except as himself.
Diana didn't bother to wonder whether or not that had played a role in his self-imposed exile from artistic society, leaving Jeremy to sell off what he could. She knew better than that, too. He was most at home by himself, and prone to long bouts of silence. She hated it when she was young, when her energy would build itself up into a fury that she couldn't begin to dissipate without some help from her father.
That same father would shrug and tell her to go walk around the mountain to find something for herself to do. There was always something to see up there, he told her, and at least on that one subject, he was right. There was always something on the mountain. Fallen trees she'd never seen before. New birds, or the same birds in new situations.
Every trip she'd taken had been worthwhile, though it didn't exactly hurt that she was stuck on the mountain and the only thing she had to amuse herself was an hour of internet browsing a day, and the mountain's face.
Now, years apart, she was looking down at a closed casket with a picture of Dad when he was younger. He couldn't have been any older than when she was born when the photo was taken; he was alongside Jeremy and Mom, and wore a tuxedo and held a drink, surrounded by people. It must have been one of the most uncomfortable moments of his life, surrounded by his paintings and people looking at them.
If he were alive now, this would qualify on that list as well, as he'd been put on display for another day, a few paintings borrowed from private collectors adorning the walls. He would have hated that. There was no need to put anything on the walls, except to fill the space to balance the room.
But the paintings had been part of him, too, even if she had never seen any of it in him. Even if he'd denied it vehemently to the end, said that it was just a practical skill he'd developed. The fact that he had taken the time to develop that skill told her everything that she needed to know. There was something more to the paintings, more to her father, than he was willing to let on.
Diana let out a breath and looked around. A half-dozen people milled around the room, at least one of them the funeral director and probably another one or two belonging to his staff. There was money in his paintings; enough money that he'd managed to keep the cabin, without having to do any 'real' work for her entire life. Since the first time she could remember, Jeremy would come up once every two or three months, take anything Dad had done, and he'd cashed the checks for Dad so that everything was taken care of.
Which made it all that much more odd that Jeremy wasn't among the people here. He had something else to take care of, some important business to attend to that wouldn't wait a minute, and she'd taken that at face value, whether it was smart or not.
A gust of wind, impossibly loud, whistled through the crack in the windows and made the building creak on its foundations, and it made Diana look around. Very little had changed. People moved around, all of them having already offered their deepest condolences, and they looked like they were avoiding her. She went back into her shell, blocked out the world around her, and let herself not think or feel much of anything, which was all she wanted in the first place.
A man stepped up to her. She didn't look at him at first, except to notice that he was there. He would tell her that he was sorry for her loss, and try to make small talk, and that would be all.
"You're Diana, aren't you?"
She nodded vaguely that she was, already planning on what she was going to do after the conversation was over. Already wondering precisely how she was going to get through the day tomorrow, when the world had to keep moving on but Dad wasn't in it any more.
"I've looked forward to meeting your father a long time, you know," he said. There was a wistful tone to his voice, one that caught in her ear, but Diana continued not to look up. "It's sad that I was never able to. I always admired his work."
"Thank you," Diana replied absently. "I'm sure he would have appreciated it."
That was a lie. Dad had never appreciated any of his admirers. That wasn't entirely true, of course. He appreciated all of them. What he didn't appreciate was the idea that there were any of them out there at all. Instead, he was convinced that it was all a big lie constructed by Jeremy to keep getting worthless paintings.
"Not likely," the man said. "I don't get the impression that Alvin Kramer ever cared much for fame."
That did make her look up. He was right, of course, but it rubbed at her the wrong way that he would think to say so. And then she saw him and her breath hitched in her chest, the words failing to materialize. Alex Blume looked like he always had, in all the papers. If anything, the photographs made him look old. She'd always thought that he was her father's age, but the lines on his face didn't give him that impression in person.
Face to face, he looked like a man wh
o smiled a lot, who had things constantly in hand and never seemed to particularly worry about anything. The impression might have been mistaken but Diana found herself captivated by his chiseled jaw, his refined nose, his sharp eyes. He looked like a hawk of a man, hard and severe and at the same time highly motivated. She had to reassess her original opinion.
Dad wouldn't have liked to meet him as a fan of the art. He was a fool for being interested at all. There was nothing in it except mechanical skill. That was what Dad would have said, though none of the critics of the art world seemed to see it that way.
But as a man, Dad would have gotten along with him perfectly. And as a woman, Diana had to admit that she could find things to like about him as well.
"What makes you say that?"
Alex smiled down at her. "If he wanted to be famous, then that was always an option for him. He chose to avoid it. What else should I think?"
She opened her mouth and closed it again. "You're not wrong," she agreed finally. "Though, you couldn't avoid it, could you?"
Alex's eyes twinkled. His story was famous, published in dozens of different magazines. A man made from nothing at all, who came out of nowhere eight years ago to astound the world with the fast-growing technology company. He'd sold it for a tidy billion dollars, and then come back for more, with another company that killed his first easily.
A man with that kind of clout couldn't avoid attention no matter what he did, she knew. There was no way.
"I wonder about that," he mused. "Still, it really is a shame."
"Yeah," she agreed. "A shame." She felt empty inside, and that was a shame, too. But hey, she consoled herself. At least she'd met a celebrity.
2
It was a long time before Diana was going to get over her father, but at least there was something to do in that time, right?
She smiled at the thought, the sarcasm rich and deep and running into and through her to fuel every little complaint that she had for the whole day. It would keep her going through the worst jobs, but this wasn't one of them. She was easily discouraged from everything, but it helped on occasion to go through the list of things she was thankful for, and this job was one of them.
It wasn't her dream career, no. She was hoping, eventually, to curate a museum. But paralegal work wasn't data entry. She had to go through old texts, 'curating' in a completely different way, to build up a solid background for the partners. It was hard work, in that it kept her busy, but in other ways it could have been a lot worse, and she had to be thankful for that.
At the very least, it kept her mind off of her troubles, which threatened to overwhelm her if anything went wrong.
And besides that, it wasn't like it was criminal law. Corporate law was something entirely different from that. It was all about figuring out precedents, same as anything else, but it was more Niccolo Machiavelli than Clive Barker, and it suited her just fine. She had been hunting before, had dealt with dead things. Living on a mountain, as far from civilization as you can, will tend to put you in those sorts of situations.
What it did, aside from that, though, was make her a little less than perfectly comfortable dealing with big societal problems like, oh, murder for example. There was a lot of stuff that Diana was pretty sure that she could handle, but there was a lot that she didn't know, as well. Like drug deals. Where did that even happen? How did it happen, given that drugs were apparently so illegal?
If they were illegal, why do them? She didn't know, and didn't care to find out, which was just one of the many things that would have made criminal law more than a bit tricky. Instead, all she had to do was figure out legal ways that their client companies could screw each other over, or avoid getting screwed. It was like a strategy game, another of Dad's little indulgences from the modern world.
She wasn't as good as he was. She wasn't very good at all, but she at least understood the concepts, and she had a healthy amount of respect for people who made the effort. David popped his head into the room and waited for her to look up after he said her name.
"What's up?"
"We've got a new client come in, and he needs his info taken down. Can you handle it?"
"Why me? I've got work to do back here, Dave, I know I'm the low man on the totem pole, but I don't see why that means I ought to be taking statements from people, or whatever."
David looked at her flatly. "I don't care either way, Di, except that I don't have much choice in the matter, okay?"
"What do you mean, don't have much choice? There are a dozen other people here more qualified to do it, and most of them aren't elbow-deep in forty year old precedent cases. Have Jen or Scott do it."
"I would," David replied, ignoring her when she started to screw up her face in confusion and opened her mouth to speak. "But I can't. Okay? Are you listening now, or should I just ignore your protests until you've let me finish?"
Diana shut her mouth and looked at him, wide eyed and expectant and ready to throw a god damned hissy fit if he didn't figure out some way to stop being such a little bitch about the whole thing. "Fine, go on."
"Thank you for your permission," he said, his tone passive-aggressively friendly. "Now, the problem is, I was asked for you by name. He says he knows you, and this isn't exactly a client I'm ready to walk away from. So if he wants to see his old friend Diana, I'm not going to send in Scott or Jennifer, am I?"
Diana raised an eyebrow. "No, I guess you wouldn't."
"I'm glad we could see eye to eye on this. He's in conference 2."
"Who is this, precisely, anyways?"
David's face split into a grin. "I would hate to spoil the surprise for you. Trust me, you won't guess."
"Okay, give me a minute." She set an envelope in between the pages where she'd been scanning through, flipped the book closed and set it atop the 'unread' stack on her right. Hopefully, that would be clear enough when she came back. Whoever it was that had decided to distract her from the work, well, they would have to figure out a damned good reason that they'd needed to do it because otherwise they were going to be in a whole world of unpleasantness. The exact same world of unpleasantness, she added silently, that they'd just decided to put her through, in spite of the fact that taking statements was not part of her job description.
She rubbed at her eyes as she walked, the yellow pad of paper under one arm, a pen stuffed hastily into her pocket. She folded the pages she'd been writing around to the back, careful not to tear them off because once she was done with this little diversion she was going to have to go back to them.
The door to conference room 2 was closed, and the windows were frosted, so all that Diana could see for a certainty was that there was one man inside, tallish, wearing dark clothing and looking out the window. It wasn't a view that Diana enjoyed. Twenty floors up was high, and she could manage to ignore it when there weren't any windows in the room, or when she was sufficiently far away from those windows that all she could see was sky.
In Conference 2, though, the windows took up most of the wall, and there was no avoiding the feeling that you were looking down on a tiny city below. A tiny city that she had no problem with when she was down on the ground, and all the buildings around her were impossibly tall. When she was in one of those impossibly tall buildings and looking out at all the other ones, slightly less tall, it was a horse of a different color.
"Hello, can I help you?"
The man turned with an easy grace, the way that a big jungle cat would, or a mountain lion. Graceful, powerful, and vaguely threatening.
"Diana. I thought that sounded like your name."
She stopped and looked at him again, for the second time in two days. Alex Blume was a big name. She suddenly realized with a sick feeling in her gut exactly why David had been so insistent on getting him whatever it was that he asked for, and she suddenly realized that it made no sense at all for him to be here.
"Mr. Blume," she stammered, and got no further before the words ran out altogether.
He had
his own lawyers, she knew. He had the money to buy up the entire firm that she stood in, as well as the accountant's office the next suite over, and the medical suite beside it. Famously litigious, Blume was assumed to have hundreds of lawyers on call at any given moment. And for some reason, he'd walked into Black & Rosen, a small firm on the backside of nowhere, and asked for a paralegal temp by name.
"How are you feeling? I know it's a bit soon to be back at work after your father's funeral, I can't imagine how you must be feeling right now."
Numb, Diana thought. I'm feeling numb. "The work helps me keep my mind off things," she lied. It didn't help. It didn't hurt. She was still trying to decide exactly what her feelings about her father were, and the job was just something that she had to do in the meantime. Unlike Dad, she didn't have a 'practical skill' that people paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.
"I bet it does," Blume agreed.
"How can we help you today, Mr. Blume?"
"Please, call me Alex," he answered easily, but if he heard the question, then he certainly didn't make any effort to give it a response.
"Well, then... 'Alex,' what brings you in here? I don't suppose it could be something legal-related. After all, I suppose you've got plenty of lawyers on staff at Blume Industrial, I don't imagine..."
"Here's a piece of advice for you," he said, cutting her off and stepping up to her in long steps that put him standing right inside her space before she even knew what was happening. "Don't try to talk your customers out of engaging with your product. Heaven knows where I'd be if I did that myself. No, it doesn't matter whether or not I've got men on staff. I came here, so you ought to assume I'm looking for something here. Isn't that right?"
"You're right, Mr., uh... Alex. I don't know what I was thinking. How can I help you?"
"First, I'd like you to set up a trust, in my name. Second, afterwards, I'd like you to come with me to dinner." He smiled, and the smile had an animal quality that set her skin itching. "Is that going to be a problem?"
