Passing Through Paradise

by Susan Wiggs

“Thanks.” She climbed the stairs past mediocre portraits of the founding members of the firm, Claggett, Banks, Saunders & Lefkowitz. She knew them through Victor, of course. She knew a lot of lawyers through Victor. Soon after the accident, an investigator with the medical examiner’s office had advised her to hire a lawyer.

  She resisted at first, seeing the measure as an admission of guilt. She’d been so ignorant, she hadn’t seen the point of having an attorney present during a death investigation. She remembered sitting in her hospital bed, her shock-numbed brain only dully aware of the images on TV—choppers and dive boats swarming over the bay, nets dragging and rescuers in survival suits diving in a desperate search for Victor. Dragged from the muddy depths, the car had looked obscene, unrecognizable—a death trap. As she watched, she’d had trouble breathing, even speaking, not because of her injuries, but because both hope and dread kept a chokehold on her.

  After a day of searching, the slow strangulation of Sandra’s hope reached an end. “Rescue” turned to “recovery.” The water temperature was fifty-four degrees, survivable for a maximum of thirteen minutes, maybe less.

  On the TV, the report came in that the team examining the bridge damage had found something unexpected—a bullet lodged in the steel cutwater at the base of a bridge pier. Not so unusual, given the habits of vandals and high school kids these days. What had been unusual was the bullet hole in the car of a high-profile elected official who made gun control a key issue.

  The moment she heard about the discovery, Sandra went straight to the cabinet in her private hospital room, changed into the clothes her mother had brought her and walked out with the objections of the hospital staff echoing in her ears. A taxi dropped her off at the firm. She insisted on seeing Banks, because he was, Victor had once told her privately, a sleazebag. He had a talent for getting even the most obvious criminal off the hook with absolutely no regard for the defendant’s guilt or innocence. With Milton Banks, it wasn’t even about money, although he liked to charge a hefty fee. It was about the game, the manipulation of the rules, the verbal tricks and leaps of logic that swept the state’s evidence into the dirt.

  The first thing he’d said to her was, “Don’t tell me a single thing more than I ask you. Don’t tell me you’re innocent—everybody is. Just give me the answers I ask for, keep it short and sweet, and I’ll take care of the rest.”

  And he had. Sandra was grateful. The last thing she wanted was to be grilled into blurting out things she never should have known, things she wanted to forget, even now. She’d been questioned numerous times, and after the final polygraph test, the medical examiner concluded that Victor had been killed in a terrible accident. She hadn’t needed defending after all. But she did now.

  She knocked once on the office door and stepped inside. He sat at his painstakingly neat desk, waiting for her. Milton Banks never, ever appeared to be busy or harried. He reminded her of a lizard sunning itself on a rock. Then, with a motion so quick and deadly that you’d miss it if you blinked, he’d attack—the lizard’s tongue flashing out and nailing a hapless fly.

  That was Milton. A bald, middle-aged, thick-waisted, sloe-eyed lizard. With the same moral sense.

  Sandra’s hairdresser, Joyce, had met him once and declared him incredibly sexy. Sandra thought she was kidding—at first. Then, as she’d come to know Milton, she realized that his very coolness, his self-assurance and his aura of power worked magic on certain women.

  Not on Sandra. At best, she found him off-putting, like a piece of fine art she didn’t care for. At worst, he scared her.

  He rose from his seat and shook her hand, knowing her well enough not to embrace her. That was another thing about Milton. He understood people, could read them based on a single meeting. Sometimes Sandra even thought he knew the secrets she held inside, but he was Milton Banks. He knew better than to pry.

  She dropped the thick envelope on his desk. “Here it is, hand delivered.”

  He sent her an ironic grin. “We were expecting this.”

  She told him briefly about the news van showing up to film the whole thing, and how a workman had derailed it.

  He chuckled appreciatively. Milton usually liked subtlety, but sometimes expressed a healthy admiration for the direct approach. Then he looked over the documents that had been served, his pale, manicured hands drifting down the long sheets as if to absorb their meaning. “Nothing special,” he concluded after his inspection. “A civil suit. The complaint is that, through reckless driving, you caused the wrongful death of their son, Victor.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “That’s the beauty of it. A civil suit doesn’t have to make sense. Doesn’t even carry the same burden of proof as a criminal case—the law requires a ‘preponderance of evidence’ or fifty-one percent, compared to ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ in a criminal trial.”

  “It was an accident. Why can’t they see that? Why can’t they let it go? I’m no more responsible for Victor’s death than I am for the weather.”

  Milton said nothing.

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “They’re seeking reparation.”

  “Money.”

  “Yeah. It’s the old ‘nothing can compensate us for the loss of our precious son so a big fat chunk of change will have to do’ shtick.”

  “God. I should be used to you by now, but I’m not,” Sandra said.

  He wasn’t even insulted. “Okay, look. Here’s what you need to know right now. This is a civil matter. It doesn’t involve jail time, regardless of the ruling—not that I’ll let it get that far. If it does, though, the value of Victor’s life is going to be determined by arbitration, or by the enlightened conscience of an impartial jury.”

  She shut her eyes, feeling the burn of tears. How much was a life worth? A life like Victor Winslow’s? What was the value of his special smile, the cost of his hidden pain, the sum total of his complicated heart?

  “You okay?”

  She opened her eyes, forced herself to concentrate.

  “The suit is seeking all the money and property he had at the time of his death—”

  “Would that include his campaign debts?” she asked. “I’ll gladly sign those over.”

  “—as well as compensation for the intangible factors — enjoyment of life, contribution to society, all that crap. You’ll also be ordered to forfeit your claim to the insurance policy. But it’s all moot, babe. Because even though they don’t have the same burden of proof as a criminal case, they won’t prove squat.”

  She hated it when he called her babe. “How long?” she asked.

  He shrugged, flipping the papers with his thumb. “We’ve got twenty days to answer this. The plaintiffs will need a lot of time for discovery—but they’re not going to discover diddly, are they?” He didn’t let her answer. He didn’t want to know. “This won’t go to trial—I won’t let it. But the Winslows being who they are, they could get a hearing fairly soon. My advice? Stick around. Go about your business. Don’t sweat it. I’ll handle the rest, and I’ll be in touch.”

  She nodded as he dictated instructions to his assistant into a recording device on the desk. When he finished, she gripped the arms of her chair, preparing to leave. “My parents are getting a divorce,” she blurted out, surprising herself even more than Milton.

  “Say what?”

  “They’ve been married thirty-six years, and now they’re getting a divorce.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Twisting her hands in her lap, she said, “It’s not your problem, I know. I needed to tell someone because it’s been bothering me.”

  “Do I look like an agony aunt?” he asked.

  “No, I just—”

  “Hire an analyst, honey, because I’m not your man. You don’t want my take on your folks splitting up.” He knew them only slightly. One of his assistants had interviewed them in the course of the death investigation. “You don’t want to hear me say this happens more often than you think. A
couple’s together since dirt was brown, and then one day they up and call it quits. Big deal. The guy probably didn’t even think about splitting up when he was working, and then he retires, and the wife’s still doing all the cooking and cleaning, and she says hey, what about me? Where’s my retirement? And the clod doesn’t get it, so she takes off.”

  “Your sensitivity is astounding,” Sandra said.

  “You don’t pay me to be sensitive.”

  She paused. “I’m fixing up my house.”

  “To sell.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have to think about how things will look.”

  “You mean, will it make me look guilty because I don’t want to live among people who think I murdered my husband?”

  “Will it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a buyer?”

  “No. The house needs a lot of restoration work before I can even list it.”

  “The handyman, then,” he said, putting two and two together. “The guy who took out the satellite dish.” “I hired him to fix things.” Milton grinned. “Honey, that’s why you hired me.”

  Chapter 14

  Mary Margaret’s dad picked her up at the curb in front of the house as if he were a taxi driver or something. Even now that this was the usual routine, she felt funny walking out the front door, her backpack trailing its straps, her mother’s watchful eyes boring into her so hard Mary Margaret swore she could feel it in her shoulder blades.

  When the divorce had first come up, she hadn’t worried too much. She figured it would go away, like a bad cold or a low grade on a spelling test. That’s the way it always used to work when she was little, around Kevin’s age. Her mom and dad would fight—not yelling or stomping around or anything. Their fights were like walking into the deep freeze at Carmine’s restaurant—a chill that made you shiver inside and out. But after the freeze, there would be some quiet talking, and everything would be okay. For a while.

  Then one day they used the word every kid on earth feared more than ghosts, more than booster shots, more than adults feared the word cancer.

  Divorce.

  The sound of the word was the wind rushing out of someone who had been punched in the stomach. At first it hurt so bad she couldn’t move or breathe. And then when she started breathing again, it subsided to a dull ache that stayed with her all day, every day, and all night, every night, and she knew it would be there for the rest of her life.

  Her dad got out of the pickup and gave her a hug. She inhaled his smell of lumber and truck and shaving stuff— the best smell in the world.

  “Heya, Princess,” he said, grabbing her backpack.

  “Hi, Daddy-O.”

  As he shoved her backpack into the cab and held the door for her, she saw him looking sideways at the house. It was one of the nicest houses in the neighborhood— definitely nicer than Kandy Procter’s, who drove Mary Margaret nuts because her aunt was on the TV news. The big yard sloped up toward the white porch, and the front door had fancy glass. The small upstairs dormer windows made the place look cozy and warm.

  Her dad had restored the house; he’d even won an award from the historical society for it. Now he could barely set foot in it without her mom’s permission and practically a signed order from a judge. Since her mom had married Carmine, they’d added a sunroom, all new furniture, everything they wanted, overnight.

  When Dad was around, changes happened gradually—you got used to each little thing before moving on to the next. Now everything whizzed along like someone had hit the FAST FORWARD button.

  Mary Margaret released a sigh as her dad shut the door and she fastened her seat belt. The weird thing was, as time went on, she found herself getting used to the way things had become. Her stepfather, Carmine, was actually an okay guy, even though his hair was oily and he smiled so hard you just knew he was faking it. But he made tons of money, bought Mary Margaret pretty much anything she wanted, treated her mom like a queen and kept her happy most of the time.

  Getting used to the divorce was scary in its own way. What kind of person was she, getting used to something so horrible? It was like learning to eat raw oysters—what was the point?

  Sometimes she wished she could be more like Kevin, who figured out a way to like everything.

  The whole business confused Mary Margaret. When her dad first moved out, her mom took her to a therapist who told her to talk about her anger in terms of numbers. Was it a ten today? A seven? A four-point-five? Mary Margaret thought it was really dumb. She did want to sort out all her scrambled feelings, but not like that, with a woman who wore Birkenstocks with socks and had Yanni music playing in the background.

  “How was school today?” Dad asked, pulling out onto Walnut Street. He balanced his wrist on the top of the steering wheel. Driving was the easiest thing in the world to him. Carmine always cussed at other drivers, shook his fist, gunned the engine, but Dad was always totally laid-back.

  “Fine, I guess. Mrs. Geiger was in a bad mood, but I got an A on my math test.” During PE, Mary Margaret had taken refuge in the nurse’s office, something she did as often as she could, but she decided not to tell her dad that. He and her mom both worried when she said she despised PE with the heat of a thousand suns.

  And actually, it wasn’t the sports or the teacher she hated. It was the freaking locker room. She was practically the only one in her grade who hadn’t started her period, the only one whose chest was still as flat as a waxed surfboard. Kandy Procter had already turned thirteen; she liked to prance around, showing off her cleavage in the lacy bras she shopped for with her famous Aunt Courtney. She also wore those butt-floss thongs for underwear. Privately, Mary Margaret thought half of Kandy’s assets consisted of body fat—the girl ate like a cow—but everything seemed to settle in all the right places on her. Eighth-grade boys were already asking her out, and once she even sneaked into a high school dance.

  “Good job on the test,” Dad said. “You’re awesome.”

  “Math is a cinch. They give you all the information, and you just have to organize it so the numbers all fit together.” She liked it when there was only one possible answer in the universe, and you could check to see if you were right by plugging the solution in to the equation. It either worked, or it didn’t.

  Her dad checked his watch. “What time’s the meeting at the Y?”

  “Four-thirty. And Kevin’s done with basketball practice at five-thirty.”

  “We’ve got a half hour to kill, then. I’d take you to Dairy Queen, but I don’t want to spoil your dinner.”

  “Gee, I don’t want that, either, Dad.”

  “Smart aleck.” He grinned at her, then did a double-take. “Hey, when did you get your ears pierced?”

  Her hand stole up and twiddled the gold post. “Monday.”

  His jaw worked, and he stared straight ahead at the road. “You’ll get an infection.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Mom took me to the doctor to get it done. These are solid gold posts.”

  “Just what you need. Two extra holes in your head.”

  “Da-ad.” Then Mary Margaret fell silent. She knew she shouldn’t feel guilty, but she did.

  He turned down Bellevue Avenue and pulled into the old Redwood Library and Atheneum. It had a wide portico with letters and Roman numerals over the door. Concrete urns and a storybook garden of gnarled trees surrounded the pathways. It was the oldest building on the street, with bare chestnut trees rising up and curving over it like giant claws. Two black crows perched in the upper branches. There was a sign in front with movable letters, and some-times kids rearranged them to spell cuss words. Today the sign said, I CANNOT LIVE WITHOUT BOOKS.—Thomas Jefferson.

  “You got your card with you?” her dad asked.

  “You bet.” Mary Margaret knew it was nerdy, but she liked carrying around the plastic card, tucked in her pocket with her lunch money and student ID. This was practically her favorite place in the whole universe. She loved to
read and always had. When she was little, she used to follow people around with a book in her hand, quietly shadowing them until they broke down and read her a story.

  It never took much to get her dad to read. Even though years had passed, she still remembered the way he got into the rhythm of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, or guffawed at Babar and the Wulli Wulli until he couldn’t even read anymore.

  Sometimes she wished she’d never learned to read, so her dad would always do it.

  They went into the library together. He took off his cap, folded the bill in half and stuck it in his back pocket. Miss Cavanaugh, who worked behind the main desk, looked up when they came in, and a huge smile lit her homely face. The fact was, practically all women loved Mary Margaret’s dad. It was gross, the way they turned flirty whenever they saw him—grocery checkers at Stop & Shop, the pediatrician, even the teenager who worked at the video store and was only a few years older than Mary Margaret. As far as she could tell, he didn’t encourage them on purpose. He was just a hunk. It wasn’t his fault.

  He nodded to greet the librarian, then whispered to Mary Margaret, “I need to look something up on the computer.” She followed him over to one of the terminals, watching idly as he clicked to local news and did a search for a name—Victor somebody. Then she lost interest; her dad was always looking up names of dead architects and old buildings and stuff.

  She wandered to the Middle Grade and Young Adult section. She was a good enough reader to read pretty much any book in the library, but adult books were strange, boring or depressing. Oprah could have them, and good riddance. Mary Margaret’s favorite books were stories about girls her own age, maybe a little older, who had the same thoughts as Mary Margaret, the same problems, and they managed to work them out in the end. Jo in Little Women. A Wrinkle in Time with Meg, who had such a weird family. Anne of Green Gables, who suffered through every possible bad thing and still managed to find happiness as a teacher on a beautiful island.

  She browsed through a few books, waiting for something to catch her interest. A few minutes later, her dad came over, standing in front of the shelves with his thumbs hooked into his back pockets.