Inherit the Shoes

by E. J. Copperman

  Tomorrow!

  I should have immediately gone to bed, to ensure that I’d get enough sleep before changing my entire life in the morning, but I was too agitated. Maybe I’d unpack a couple more cartons of books. That was probably a bad idea, as I don’t function well on too little sleep, but I really don’t function well after taking a ‘sleep aid,’ as they like to say on television, so that didn’t seem to be an option.

  Of course, it’s not like there were any shelves left on which to store the books, either. My apartment, already lined with bookshelves that were full, wasn’t going to contain everything I’d brought with me, and that was unsettling, considering it had all fit into my one-bedroom apartment in Westfield.

  I opened a carton marked ‘Books’ in clear block letters and mechanically took them out of the box, without a clue as to where I’d store the volumes on mediation and family law I’d bought since getting this job. Probably should have looked at those, too, before starting tomorrow. Maybe knowing something about the work I’d be doing would have helped.

  When my phone rang, in a tone that echoed far too much in this unfamiliar space, I actually gasped. It was late, and I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles.

  It took a while to find the phone, but I hadn’t turned on voice mail when I’d changed carriers, so it continued to ring long enough for me to trace the sound to the galley kitchen, where the phone was lying under an opened newspaper. I picked it up.

  ‘Did you see that?’ Angie, three thousand miles and three time zones away, was considerably more alert than I. Angie was, in fact, the poster girl for Alert.

  ‘Angie! It’s got to be two in the morning where you are! What are you doing up?’ I took the cell phone into the ‘living area,’ a misnomer, since the only things that could have lived well here were insects that feed off the paper in law books. They probably would have gorged themselves to death.

  ‘I couldn’t wait!’ Angie breathed. ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘See what?’ Four books on the psychology of sex offenders. Perfect to display in one’s main room. Really livens up first dates. Not that I anticipated a lot of those, but …

  Angie breathed dramatically. ‘Legality. You can’t tell me you didn’t see it, after all those times I noodged you about it.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I saw it.’ Damn, these things must weigh thirty pounds each! You’d think with all this lifting, I’d be more buff.

  I don’t look bad, mind you, but in L.A., all the women look like Margot Robbie, and that gets just a little intimidating after … about ten minutes.

  ‘Well? What’d you think? Wasn’t it great?’

  It was late, and I wasn’t in the mood to be diplomatic. Besides, I was carrying about sixty pounds worth of law books to a shelf that had room for ten. ‘Oh, come on, Ang! Grabbing a witness’ wrist? A lawyer would be held in contempt for seven things this guy did in five minutes!’

  A continent away, I could see Angie roll her eyes, and I wasn’t even on Skype. ‘You always get caught up in the details,’ she said. ‘Can’t you just live the emotion? Besides, that Patrick McNabb – he’s not too bad to look at, huh?’

  ‘McNabb? Which one was he?’ I tried pushing the books onto the shelf, which luckily was anchored on the other end by a wall, or I’d have moved half the books I’d already placed, and they’d have ended up on the floor. Damn laws of physics!

  ‘Oh, stop it. He’s the one who plays Arthur Kirkland, and he’s definitely your type. All serious and important-looking. You wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.’

  ‘He couldn’t even get to the bed – it’s surrounded by boxes. Angie, it’s late and I …’

  ‘How are you doing, really?’ she said.

  For a second, I wasn’t sure whether the question was coming from Angie, or from the inner voice in my brain. But I realized I had to answer. ‘I’m fine.’

  Angie’s voice now took on a formal quality. ‘Fine, huh? Fine is what people say when their real answer is, “You don’t want to know how awful I feel.”’

  I laughed. Angie could always do that to me, no matter what. It had kept us together through high school and college, and as I went on to law school. Even during the eight years I was an assistant prosecutor for Middlesex County, I’d always been able to count on Angie for a laugh, no matter how much the system made me want to jump out the window.

  Now, Angie managed a small chain of Dairy Queen stores in central Jersey, and I’d made an impulsive mistake – highly unlike me – by moving to Los Angeles. ‘You were the one who wanted the change,’ she reminded me. ‘You were tired of criminal law. You didn’t want to put people in jail any more …’

  ‘I know, I know.’ I sat down on the floor again and smoothed back my hair with my palm. Was that a gray hair between my fingers? No. That was my finger. ‘It’s just that I’m a little nervous, you know? First day tomorrow, and everything.’

  ‘You worried it’ll be boring? Doing divorces and stuff like that instead of locking up the bad guys?’

  Angie really did think that the law was practiced like it is on TV. I knew Angie was very intelligent, but sometimes she made it hard to believe.

  ‘No, I’m not worried it’ll be boring,’ I droned. ‘I’m worried I’ll be bad at it.’

  ‘Oh, please.’ Angie’s pursed lips could be heard through satellite feeds. ‘You’ve never been bad at anything, and you know how to be a good lawyer. How bad can you be?’

  ‘I’m about to find out. Listen, Ang, it’s late here, and it’s really late there. I’ve got to …’

  ‘Any guys?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Any guys yet? You go out with anybody?’

  I rolled my eyes heavenward, despite the fact that Angie couldn’t see the gesture. ‘I’ve been here two weeks, Ang.’

  ‘Wouldn’t take me that long.’

  ‘Maybe I’m more … selective than you are.’ I could see Angie grinning in my mind’s eye.

  ‘You callin’ me a slut, Ms Moss?’

  ‘Hey, if the three-inch stiletto heel fits …’

  Angie ignored that. ‘So how come you haven’t met any guys yet?’

  ‘You know my recent history,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.

  Unfortunately, Angie did, and Angie generally gets what she wants, because she refuses not to. ‘So you went out with your boss and he dumped you for a twenty-two year old refugee from a wet T-shirt contest.’

  ‘She was a court reporter.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Angie was on a roll. ‘That’s no reason to move all the way across the country and give up on men forever.’

  ‘Angieeeeee! Let me go to beeeeeeeeed!’ I sounded like a whiny six-year-old.

  ‘Alone?’ Angie’s voice took on a deeper tone. ‘Come on, Sandy. How are you really?’

  ‘I’m fine. Really.’

  ‘Wow. That sounds so … adequate.’ Angie never let me off the hook for anything. It was why I loved her, and wanted to wring her neck.

  ‘Oh, come on …’

  ‘I’ll bet the people out there don’t even go down the shore, do they?’

  ‘Angie …’

  ‘Do they?’

  I refrained from sighing. ‘No, they go to the beach.’

  ‘Do they drive on Route One?’

  ‘No,’ I admitted, ‘they get on The Five.’

  ‘Do they go to the diner?’

  ‘Not usually. They take a meeting for breakfast, or for a latte.’

  Angie was gaining momentum now. ‘Have they ever heard of New Jersey?’

  ‘No,’ I allowed, ‘they go back East.’

  ‘And they eat guacamole, don’t they?’ Angie’s voice had a defiant, triumphant tone to it.

  ‘Hey, I like guacamole!’ Angie laughed, and I found myself joining in. ‘Angie. I have an idea. They have ice cream out here. You could get a job. Come on out and we’ll take over the town together. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you made a choice and
now you’re second-guessing yourself. You don’t need me. You need to be yourself and show those California babes what a Jersey girl can do! You need …’

  ‘I withdraw the offer. Ang, it’s after eleven, I’ve been unpacking boxes all day, I have more boxes to unpack before I get to bed, and I have to get up and go to a scary new job in the morning. So how about lightening up on me this once?’

  Angie took a long pause, thinking about it. ‘No.’

  We both burst out laughing, and because we both had to get to bed very soon, stayed up talking for another hour.

  TWO

  ‘I’m sorry to have to throw you into this on your first day.’ Holiday Wentworth (Holiday! Doesn’t anyone out here have a regular name?), a junior partner in Seaton, Taylor, Evans and Bach, was supposed to be walking with me as we made our way down what must have been the world’s longest corridor.

  But Holiday’s gait was so purposeful and quick that I had a hard time keeping up without actually panting. It didn’t help that I’d gotten roughly forty minutes of sleep the night before, and had last gone to the gym the previous September. ‘It’s just that Wilson McCavy’s daughter fell off her pinto and he had to go to the emergency room, and, well, you know how it is …’

  ‘Sure, I know how it is,’ I answered, trying not to break into a jog. (Fell off her what? These people have their own horses?)

  ‘You’ll be there just to observe, really,’ Holiday continued as I began to despair of my sweat glands. ‘Junius Bach’ (Junius?) ‘has been handling this divorce from the beginning, and he knows all the aspects of the case. Your instructions are quite simply to sit there and don’t say anything unless you have to.’ I was much too busy looking at Holiday’s up-to-the-minute suit to listen closely. My own outfit, the fourth I’d tried on that morning (after modeling three others in the mirror the night before) looked in comparison like I’d just walked out of Annie Sez. But it wasn’t like I was intimidated or anything.

  We’d reached the door, which was both a relief for my legs and lungs and a serious source of concern for my brain and stomach. Holiday looked me over with great care.

  ‘We need two lawyers in there because it’s such a high-profile case,’ she said. ‘After all, Pat and Patsy were the couple for a while. Remember?’

  ‘Oh sure, I remember,’ I said. Pat and Patsy who?

  ‘Well, here’s the file.’ Holiday handed me a thick accordion file seemingly bursting with documents, and all this was for a preliminary meeting. For a divorce? By the time this case reached a judge, they’d need a burro to haul in the paperwork. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll do fine.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ I blurted. In retrospect, probably not the kind of thing one voices on one’s first day of work. There should be a class for the first day of work. Maybe Learning Annex could be alerted.

  ‘I’ve seen your CV, and I know your work,’ Holiday smiled. ‘I’m not worried.’

  I took the file and tried to look confident, ending up somewhere north of desperate. It was the professional equivalent of a blind date, and that was not one of my strengths. ‘Thanks, Holiday.’

  Holiday reached for the door as she said, ‘You look wonderful. Don’t worry.’ Then she turned the knob, opened the door, said, ‘And by the way, call me Holly,’ and literally pushed me into the conference room.

  It was, as befit the corridor outside, the largest conference room I’d ever seen, and it was so tastefully (and expensively) decorated, so absolutely up-to-the-minute in its appointments, that I had to wonder if it might just be a movie set, struck and re-designed for each successive meeting. Why not? It was L.A., after all. In the center of the room was a table so long, so highly polished, and so flawless that I thought it should have a gutter on each side and ten wooden pins set in a triangular pattern at the far end.

  Instead, there were chairs all around it, but only seven were occupied – as far from the door as possible, of course. There, a Hollywood-perfect beauty, a woman of indeterminate age in this era of cosmetic surgery, sat glumly next to a man of extremely determinate age: he was in his fifties, balding and bulging. This must have been the beauty’s attorney, and my opponent (or to be more precise, Bach’s). Seated to his left and a little farther off the table was a young woman with a pad and a cassette recorder – the lawyer’s secretary (pardon me, assistant).

  In the last chair, farthest from me, was my own counterpart, the attorney who would not speak, but who was there to show that, hey, they have more than one lawyer in their firm, too. This one, a young man who looked around the room as if pricing it, was probably lining up his next job already, and wouldn’t mind if it were here.

  ‘It’s about time,’ said the cosmetic beauty, whose name must be Patsy Something – unless the man was named Patsy; what a horrible thought! ‘We’ve been waiting here ten minutes.’

  I headed toward my side (that is, Bach’s side) of the table. There, in perfect opposition to the others, sat the Bach team: first up was the soon-to-be-ex-husband (Pat?), a man of such easy and devastating good looks that I wanted to instantly hate him, but couldn’t. I hoped he didn’t crinkle his eyes when he smiled, because then it would be impossible to remain professional up close.

  He stood and held out a hand to me. ‘It’s not her fault, Patsy,’ he said in an upper-class British accent that had surely started out cockney. ‘She just got here.’ Then he turned to me. ‘Hi. I’m Pat.’ I took his hand and almost winced – he did crinkle his eyes, and I was done for the day.

  ‘My apologies,’ I said to the room. ‘I hope I didn’t hold you all up for long.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said Patsy, but she didn’t elaborate, so I assumed she was quoting the Beatles.

  With some reluctance, I let Pat drop my hand, and moved past him. Next in line was Junius Bach himself, a man in his sixties who could surely audition for the role of God and be hired on the strength of his headshot alone. Tall, impeccable, with the air of someone who really does own the world, Bach frowned at the way the meeting had begun, and his frown told me to get to my chair quickly. It was a decent bet I wouldn’t end up dating my boss in this job.

  My seat was next to Bach’s assistant, a young woman named … Mary? Martha? Marta! … I had met her at one of the orientation meetings, and remembered that she had smiled unnervingly all the time we were speaking, usually looking past my head to see if someone really important was coming.

  I sat down, and so did Pat. He stopped crinkling his eyes when he looked at his soon-to-be ex-wife. Patsy wasn’t chewing gum, but she should have been. And cracking it loudly.

  Seated, I set about trying very hard not to fall asleep. It was too warm in here, and Bach, who spoke first, had a soothing, sonorous voice.

  ‘This meeting,’ Bach intoned, ‘is to begin the process toward an agreement in your divorce.’ He said ‘your divorce’ to Patsy as if he were bestowing a gift upon her. ‘If we are all willing to be reasonable, we should be able to reach an agreement quickly and without any unpleasantness.’

  I scanned through the documents in my file, not looking up as Patsy, between sealed lips, made a noise that sounded like a balloon slowly deflating. ‘Reasonable,’ Patsy said, drawing out the word like a piece of taffy. ‘There’s nothing reasonable about it. He signed the pre-nup, and he knows he gets squat. What’s there to be reasonable about?’ Patsy’s voice had an inflection that would have inspired Gandhi to homicide.

  According to the file, Esmerelda Patricia DeNunzio (Patsy, indeed!) and Patrick Allan Dunwoody had wed only sixteen months earlier, in Las Vegas, Nevada (and they said it wouldn’t last, I thought), then took up residence in Ms DeNunzio’s home in Bel Air, California. A pre-nuptial agreement had been signed, which was unusual for a quick Vegas wedding (you had to speculate that Patsy carried the forms with her wherever she went), and it had stipulated that Mr Dunwoody was entitled to only two percent of all property in the marriage should the couple divorce, because his earnings at the time of the wedding were approximately t
wo percent of those of Ms DeNunzio.

  The problem was, in the year and four months since then, Dunwoody’s income had skyrocketed, while DeNunzio’s had, um, not. In fact, her earnings in the past year made up only four percent of the couple’s income, according to the tax information in the file. Dunwoody’s employment by – I had to check twice – First Amendment, Inc. had included a huge salary, and he had substantial income (in fact, much more substantial than his salary) from various other sources, while DeNunzio’s income as (according to her tax return) a ‘recording artist and freelance entertainer’ had plummeted from the previous year’s levels.

  Bach ignored Patsy’s reaction and plowed on through. ‘We believe that the signed pre-nuptial agreement is null and void,’ he said. ‘During the period of the marriage, the dramatic shift in the incomes involved made the intention of the agreement moot.’

  I was trying my best to suppress a yawn, and my eyes started to water just a bit. Pat Dunwoody looked at me with great sympathy, probably wondering what had made this fruitcake burst into tears at a divorce settlement meeting for someone else.

  Patsy looked at her lawyer, a man who looked like he’d combed his hair for a full half hour that morning. ‘What’s he mean?’ she asked. ‘What’s this about the pre-nup being mute?’

  ‘Mute is what you should be,’ Dunwoody said. ‘Be quiet.’

  ‘Patrick,’ Bach admonished, looking mildly amused, ‘keep a civil tongue in your head.’

  ‘Why should I, when she’s been putting her tongue down every throat in Hollywood trying to get a gig?’ Dunwoody was not a man to restrain his emotions, apparently.

  ‘You want to talk tongues. We’ll talk tongues!’ Patsy replied, though no one had been speaking to her. ‘Let’s talk about the tongue on that silicone job you met when we were on our honeymoon, for crissakes!’

  I supposed that in another era, Patsy would have been considered ‘brassy,’ but now she was just obnoxious. She was worth millions, according to the financial statements in the folder, and yet she looked like she aspired to be a Las Vegas showgirl if she could catch the right break. I suppressed the urge to speak, and let Bach handle the situation, in accordance with my instructions.