Staying Cool

by Catherine Todd

  “Oh, she made it clear that it is,” he said. “I wonder what she could have been hearing about me. What’s more, I wonder who she could have been talking to.”

  I ignored the innuendo and tried a diversionary tactic. “Did she tell you they bought a faïence bowl? I haven’t seen it myself.”

  “What?” His voice took on a note of dread. “What color is it?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him, hoping it would assuage his suspicions. “I told you, I wasn’t consulted.”

  “These amateurs.” His tone was full of loathing. “They’ll ruin everything.”

  If we weren’t on such strained terms, I might have laughed. Sometimes we—the consultants and the decorators—forget whose house it is, anyway. I wondered if Valentin lived in a white palace, an igloo of his own making.

  “We might have to redesign the whole interior concept from scratch,” he added bitterly. “It could set the finish date back for weeks.”

  “What about the party?” I asked, trying not to let my amusement show. What was this, the decorator’s domino theory? One piece out of place, and the whole system comes crashing down.

  “They should have thought of that before they went off on their own.”

  Well, at least his venom was momentarily directed away from me. “Valentin,” I said cautiously, “I’ve been meaning to ask you…”

  “What?” His voice was sharp.

  “Did you know Natasha Ivanova?”

  There was a long silence. “We met.”

  “Was she a serious art collector? Mira said—”

  “If Mira said so, why isn’t that enough for you?”

  “I’m not sure Mira would know,” I said candidly. “She also says she was some kind of Russian aristocrat—remember?—but I don’t see how that could possibly be true.”

  He snorted.

  “She wasn’t?”

  “Not in this century.” His voice sounded suspicious. “Why are you asking questions about her? I thought she was dead.”

  “She is. I was on the jury that convicted her killer, remember? That’s why I’m asking.”

  “Then go ask the police or somebody else what you want to know. Stop bothering me about it. I don’t know anything.”

  “Well, thanks anyway,” I said into the phone.

  But he had already hung up.

  Moment-of-truth time. Where was I going to go from here? If I pursued my quest for the complete biography of Natasha Ivanova any further, I was going to have to find a way to do it that did not involve asking people—particularly any of my clients—about her directly. And then, what about my disturbing little visit to the scene of the crime? And what about Cynthia, who stood poised to reorganize my life and blanket me with a ton of information about matchmaking services? There had to be more productive ways to spend my time, like making money or reading or baking (low-fat) cookies.

  So why was I thinking about calling the lawyer whose name Cynthia had given me?

  Because—and it’s probably pathetic to admit this—this was the most interested I’d been in anything in the last five years.

  Okay, so maybe Mark was right, and I needed to get a life so I could let go of this trial. The Greek Chorus warning me against getting more involved was certainly swelling. So far, my well-wishers had obligingly provided me with a mixed bag of motives for my continuing interest. I was identifying with the poor and downtrodden. I felt guilty about the poor and downtrodden because I didn’t identify with them. I was Latina. I wasn’t Latina. I had a secret desire for dating and matrimony. I was running away from my feelings. It was my father’s fault.

  One or more or all of them might have been right. There may have been other reasons, too. For the moment, I didn’t care. It was enough to be interested. Not obsessed, just interested. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt compelled to pursue something that didn’t have to do with work or Andy.

  Well, I knew when. Since Michael had died. One by one, I’d pared away all the nonessentials—my water-colors, my dance class, cooking (as opposed to heating up), other people—till I was left with what I could manage. Breathing. Getting through the day. My daughter.

  I hadn’t been interested in much else for a long time.

  The Greek Chorus could go hang.

  9

  Cynthia’s lawyer friend, Scott Crossland, turned out to be a dud.

  In the first place, he answered the phone himself, which took me aback. Successful lawyers generally pay somebody to screen their calls so they can concentrate on the activities that bring in the bucks.

  In the second place, he was completely uninterested in a consultation. In fact, he refused.

  “Cynthia Weatherford referred me to you,” I told him.

  He hesitated. I was thrilled that it seemed to take him a minute to remember who she was. “Oh, yes. From City of Angels.” His voice was low and a little distracted-sounding. I didn’t seem to have his full attention.

  “That’s right. I was wondering if I might make an appointment for a consultation.”

  “To be perfectly frank, I’m rather overscheduled at the moment,” he said, not particularly regretfully. “Could you tell me what this is about? If I can’t see you myself, I might be able to refer you to someone.”

  I took a breath. Lawyers made me nervous. Nobody who has sat through an entire criminal trial can be perfectly confident of their sincerity. Despite a fervent belief in the Constitution, I still think there must be something wrong with somebody who could spend his whole life trying to keep people who he knows are guilty from getting what they deserve.

  “I was on a jury. We convicted the man,” I told him, trying to be as brief and straightforward as possible. “Since then, I’ve learned some things that didn’t come out in the trial.”

  He chuckled. “I’m sorry to say it, but that’s not as uncommon an experience as it ought to be, Ms…uh—”

  “Laws.”

  “Ms. Laws. The jury is often kept in the dark about a lot of things, and it’s not surprising if you feel a little betrayed afterward. But that doesn’t mean—”

  “I know it doesn’t necessarily mean that the verdict was unfair,” I said hurriedly, before he could launch into the same lecture I’d already gotten from Mark. “But I’ve done a little investigating since then, and it’s raised some questions. I’m wondering what I ought to do.”

  “What is it you would like from me?” he asked pleasantly enough, but with little enthusiasm.

  Now I knew how the Jehovah’s Witnesses felt when they knocked on the door. I resolved to be nicer next time. Maybe even accept the magazine. “I thought if I could go over the facts of the case as I wrote them down during the trial, and then told you what I’ve learned since then, you might be able to advise me,” I said.

  “You aren’t saying that you were coerced into a verdict, or that anyone tampered with the jury?” He sounded somewhat more interested.

  “No,” I said, almost regretfully.

  “Do you have any hard evidence that the person who was convicted didn’t do the crime? Or that somebody else did?”

  “No, but—”

  “Do you have any evidence that any of the witnesses were lying, anything like that?”

  “Not evidence, but some doubts about a couple of the facts as they were presented by the police,” I said.

  “You think the police set up the defendant? Or that they’re trying to cover something up?”

  He’d lost interest. He made it sound as if I’d been watching too much TV. “I don’t know that,” I told him. “I don’t really know anything. I just know that I feel there’s a small chance I’ve made a mistake. At the very least, I want to find out what the facts are, so my conscience won’t bother me any more. Besides, I’m curious.”

  “Ms…umm,” he said, in the overly gentle voice you might use with someone who had just announced that the Martians were attacking Pittsburgh, “my advice to you would be to think very carefully before you pursue this. I�
�m sorry to say that what you’ve told me is so—well, I have to say ‘flimsy’ for lack of a better word—that further action is almost certainly not warranted. I have to tell you that no court ever wants to reopen a case without an extremely compelling reason.”

  “But—”

  “Look,” he said, “I know how hard it is to serve on a jury, particularly when you have to send someone to jail. It’s very upsetting. I have the utmost respect for your scruples, believe me. It’s only natural to wonder if you did the right thing. But let me give you some advice: take a vacation, get involved with something else for a while. See if that doesn’t make you feel more comfortable about it.”

  I recognized the tone. It was the same one I had used when my fellow juror, Hazel, had invited me to a private viewing of her thimble collection before some perspicacious museum snapped it up.

  So add another voice to the Greek Chorus. He had me pegged as some bleeding-heart softy with too much time on her hands.

  “And if it doesn’t? I’m sorry, I know how this must sound,” I said apologetically, “but I honestly think it’s worth investigating further. There’s too much at stake to ignore what I’ve been hearing.”

  “Then you could go to the police. Or hire a private investigator, and if you find out anything substantial, then go to the police and the attorney who represented the person you convicted.”

  “I can’t afford a private investigator.”

  “Then let’s be frank, Ms. Laws; you couldn’t afford me either.”

  “I see,” I said coldly.

  “I’m sorry; I’m not trying to be offensive. I always think it’s better to be candid about these things up front. Besides, I honestly don’t think it will be worth your while to pursue this. Most defendants really are guilty, unfortunately. I should know.”

  “Never mind, then,” I told him. “I can see that I’m wasting your time—”

  “Excuse me just a moment. Ermmm?” His hand was over the receiver while he was talking to someone else in the room.

  “I hope you’ll forgive me,” he said, suddenly curt. “I’m afraid I really must hang up now. Sorry I haven’t been any help, but I wish you luck.”

  He was going to hang up before I could get a referral to someone else. Besides, I hadn’t even told him who the victim was. “But—”

  “Hafta go, sorry.” He paused. “I won’t charge you for this consultation.”

  “Send me the bill,” I insisted. But I was talking into a dead receiver.

  “Go to the police,” Scott Crossland had said. I’d gotten the same advice, if you wanted to call it that, from Valentin. But I had no evidence, other than my doubts about the police report, and what I needed was more information about the “eyewitness” to the burglary. I wanted to find out more about Ramon Garcia and what happened to him after he left Ivanova Associates. I had no sources of information and no knowledge about how to even get started. How was I ever going to find someone to help me?

  Well, there was someone I could ask—a policeman and an honest man, presumably. A Latino. He might be perfect, a person who could help me find out what I needed to know, someone with street smarts and a road map for conducting investigations.

  He might be perfect, that is, except that I was the last person in the world, but one, he wanted anything to do with.

  I couldn’t really blame him.

  He was my brother.

  Here is my mother’s guilty secret: She gave away her child.

  Since that made for a certain awkwardness if anyone trotted out the family snapshots—“Who is that adorable baby with the curly black hair?”—she ripped them out of the albums and pasted over the bare spots with baby pictures of me, a little girl with straight brown hair and pink bows. Maybe she’d saved them, and I’d find a secret cache when she died. I hoped so, but I had my doubts.

  My brother, Tommy, the reason for my parents’ ill-fated union, was eighteen months old when my father talked my mother into a month-long trip to Mexico to visit his family. She was already convinced she had made a Dreadful Mistake in marrying someone who, unlike the soulful romantic Latin who had courted her, displayed only a passing interest in her after the wedding. By that time, however, she was pregnant with me. The Feminine Mystique was decades away; there was no such thing as no-fault divorce. Having thrown in her lot with my father for better or for worse, she was, to all intents and purposes, stuck.

  Since the Packard was deemed unsuitable for a lengthy trip through a country full of rutted roads and maniacal drivers, my parents elected to take the train. My father at first suggested and then insisted that they leave Tomás in the care of his younger sister and her husband, who lived in East L.A. My aunt had been married two years without offspring, and my father thought Tommy would be a comfort, or maybe just a lucky talisman. Whatever the truth of it, he wore down my mother’s objections by pointing out, perfectly truthfully, that a toddler would be miserable on a train.

  In the end, it was my mother who was the most miserable. She contracted amoebic dysentery from drinking water out of the tap in one of the train’s unspeakable bathrooms, washing out her mouth after a bout of morning sickness drove her, in extremis, to use the facilities. Her lifelong revulsion with everything Mexican, brought to fruition when my father abandoned us, probably had its seeds in that toilet.

  Her recovery was slow and painful, and Tomás stayed at my aunt’s.

  Two months later, on the mend but still wan and exhausted from endless bouts of diarrhea and the aftereffects of antibiotics, she called her sister-in-law and asked for her son to come home. My aunt told her he had chills—a mild touch of the flu, the doctor said, but he should stay in bed. Why didn’t they leave him there a few more days? My mother agreed.

  A few days later, my mother called back. My aunt grew hysterical and hung up on her. My father, summoned into service, phoned his sister and had a lengthy chat in Spanish with her husband. He returned to my mother, grave but calm. She’s just upset, he told her. She’s grown so fond of the child. She’s planning a little “good-bye” party for the weekend. I said he could stay.

  When they called back again, the phone was disconnected.

  My mother wanted to call the police, but my father jumped into the car and took off. “Don’t do anything till you hear from me,” he warned my mother, yelling out the window as he drove away. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  Three days later he returned, disheveled and exhausted, without the baby. He’d been drinking, too. “I found them,” he reported to my mother. “They took Tomás and went to stay with friends.” He looked at my mother with red-rimmed eyes. “Teresa says she will kill herself if we take him back,” he announced. He lowered his gaze. “She is barren,” he told her, stricken by the horror of such a terrible fate. “She wants to raise Tomás. She says…” His eyes traveled to my mother’s belly. “She says we will have other sons.”

  I don’t know how long the campaign against my mother’s resistance went on. I know my aunt called her daily, hysterical, pleading. She would cut her wrists; she would jump into the ocean. My mother could not have been accustomed to such theatricality; her own emotional temperature was a definite lukewarm, her upbringing inhibited and restrained. My uncle added his entreaties, promising to let her see the child as often as she wanted.

  At some point, because he was a man, the head of the family, and, possibly, because he was already planning to skip town, my father announced that he had given his sister permission to keep Tomás.

  My mother, for whatever reason, agreed.

  Or at least that’s what might have happened. It’s not as if my mother was forthcoming about the details. For a while she went to visit on the bus—my father having absconded with the car—but after he left she seemed to lose the power to deal with his family, and eventually even those visits stopped.

  When I was about eight, my abuela, my father’s mother, moved up from Mexico. She asked to see me, but my mother refused to take me to that house. In hinds
ight, I can’t blame her. My grandmother came to our apartment instead, a tiny woman with a large-sized determination. She brought my brother, Tommy, with her.

  The most sadistic of torturers could not have devised a more excruciating scene. My mother stood white-faced and rigid, while my grandmother embraced me, calling me “Elena” and pushing “Tomasito” forward with the announcement, complete news to me, that this was my brother. He was dark-haired and sturdy, with black eyes. My mother fanned herself and collapsed into the armchair, picking at the slit where the stuffing was coming through while my grandmother went into the kitchen and made her some tea. Tommy and I spent most of the time glaring at each other with suspicion.

  I am standing next to the kitchen door, uncertainly. I am so polite. I am on my best behavior, but I am afraid, too. I’ve shaken hands with my grandmother and the boy, but I don’t know what to say. We don’t have a lot of visitors.

  I can’t help staring at him. How can he be my brother? What terrible thing has he done, that he doesn’t live here?

  My mother is sitting in her chair like one of those body-snatchees whose brain has been taken over by alien invaders. She is never much fun at the best of times, but now she has me worried. I’d like to go to her, but an invisible barrier of misery encloses her. She doesn’t want to be touched.

  Tommy sidles up to me. “You stink,” he says conversationally.

  “I do not,” I protest. I know he’s lying. My mother is very strict about bath times.

  “Would you like to see my room?” I inquire, mostly because I can’t think of anything else to say. If he is my brother, maybe he has a right to see it. Maybe he wants to come live with us. My stomach clenches in panic.

  He doesn’t say anything. I wonder if I should offer again, but I decide against it. Besides, I know he would hate it, even though it isn’t pink or frilly like some of my friends’ rooms. Boys don’t like rooms that are neat; I know that much already. They don’t like stuffed animals, either, and that was all I had to show him, my row of bears and assorted companions, arranged along my bed according to seniority. I can’t stand it if one is out of place.