by Paul Levine
“Hello, Bobby,” Victoria said cheerfully, trying to put the boy at ease. She walked to the sofa and extended a hand, but the boy shrank farther into the cushions.
“Bobby doesn't like to be touched,” Steve said, tightening the towel around his waist. In the light, Victoria noticed he kept in shape. Good pecs and shoulders. She looked away, wishing he'd get dressed.
“Victoria's my friend,” Steve said.
For the sake of the child, she decided not to contradict him.
“She's not going to take you away,” Steve continued in a gentle voice he never employed in court. “You remember what I told you about her?”
“She's a rich bitch-kitty with a wicked tongue,” Bobby said, matter-of-factly.
“Isn't that sweet?” Victoria said, forcing a smile.
“Uncle Steve said something else, too.” The boy's voice grew deeper: “She's pretty and smart and the best rookie lawyer I've ever seen.”
Surprised, Victoria turned to Steve. “You said that?”
“Bobby only speaks the truth. He couldn't tell a lie if he wanted to.”
“What an odd couple you make.”
“And he said you don't have Rudnicks,” the boy added.
“That's enough, Bobby,” Steve said.
“Rudnicks?” She'd never heard the word.
“Sneakers,” Steve said. “Like Reeboks.”
“No they're not,” Bobby said.
Victoria shot Steve a look, but he wouldn't give anything away. “Bobby's a very special kid,” he said, pride in his voice.
“I'm just a spaz who's good at stuff nobody cares about.”
“I'm sure you're much more than that,” Victoria said.
A voice interrupted them. “You coming back to bed, Steve?”
Coming from a hallway was a young woman with long, dark hair. She looked familiar to Victoria, who was distracted, perhaps because the woman wore nothing but gold hoop earrings and a black beaded thong. Her breasts were round and full, her nipples pointed inward, like slightly crossed eyes. Now Victoria had two chests not to stare at.
“Oops,” the woman said, trying to cover her breasts with hands too small for the task.
“Those are Rudnicks,” Bobby said, pointing at the woman's chest.
“Oh, Ms. Lord,” the woman said. “I didn't know . . .”
Of course. Sofia Hernandez. The court reporter with the peekaboo blouse, the available phone number . . . and the large boobs.
“Hello, Sofia,” Victoria said, then turned to Steve. “Maybe I should go.”
“Hang on a second.” He was headed down the hallway toward the bedroom.
Again Bobby dropped his voice into a perfect impersonation of his uncle's: “Dr. Harold Rudnick is a skilled plastic surgeon, a diplomat in the Academy. His trademark is a full contour of the breast, rotund without being pendulous. If the plaintiff wanted anything but the traditional Rudnick rack, she should have informed the doctor.”
“Word for word from Steve's closing argument,” Sofia told Victoria, her arms folded under her own rotund Rudnicks. “He got me a free boob job just for being the court reporter. You want, I bet Steve could get you a discount.”
What was the polite reply to such an offer? Victoria didn't know.
“I mean, yours got a nice shape,” Sofia continued. “You just need some size.”
I'm on a strange planet in a distant galaxy. How did I get here?
Steve came back into the room, carrying Victoria's missing shoe and wearing sweatpants, thank God. He tossed a man's shirt to Sofia.
“The old Rudnicks were silicone,” Bobby said. “Some funky chunky neurotoxins.”
Victoria wished they would change the subject. Sofia slipped into the shirt but didn't button it. She looked like one of those magazine ads that seemed to suggest: Sex was grand, let's drink some vodka.
“Methyl ethyl ketone,” Bobby continued. “Cyclohexanone, acetone, polyvinyl chloride, xylene, ethyl acetate, benzene—”
“Stop showing off,” Steve said.
“Kid's brilliant,” Sofia said. “Sometimes I wish I was an idiot savant.”
“I'm not an idiot, you twat,” Bobby said.
“Bobby! That's an ugly, ugly word,” Sofia said.
“No it's not,” Bobby said. “‘Twat. Noun, seventeenth century. Slang for vulva, related to thwaite, meaning forest clearing.'”
“You've memorized the dictionary?” Victoria asked.
“Not all of it. Wanna play the name game?”
“I don't know how.”
“Give him a famous name,” Steve said.
“George W. Bush,” Victoria said.
The boy squinted behind his thick lenses and chewed his lip. Then he smiled for the first time, revealing two rows of shiny braces. “HE GREW BOGUS!”
“Good one,” Steve said.
“It's called an angiogram,” Sofia said.
“Anagram,” Bobby corrected.
“How did you do that?” Victoria asked.
“Letters float around in my head, and I catch them. Give me another name.”
“Monica Lewinsky,” Victoria said.
Bobby fidgeted a moment, then said, “INSANE MILKY COW.”
“Wow,” Victoria said.
Steve sat down on the sofa. “Bobby suffered sensory deprivation—”
“When Mom locked me in a dog cage for, like, a year,” Bobby said.
“Oh, God,” Victoria said.
“Bobby's left brain sort of shut down,” Steve said. “Limbic memory, logical and sequential thinking. But his right brain took off. Striatal memory, habit and procedural thinking.”
“I can memorize stuff,” Bobby said.
“We've been reading a lot of medical journals together,” Steve said.
“We're best buds,” Bobby said. “I'm gonna live with Uncle Steve until I'm old enough to hook up with Jenna Jameson.”
“Is she from the neighborhood?” Victoria asked.
“Duh.”
“She's an actress,” Steve said.
“I don't think I've seen her movies,” Victoria said.
“Jennatilia,” Bobby said. “Lip Service. Cum One, Cum All.”
“I should be going,” Victoria said.
“Will you come back?” Bobby asked.
“Now, there's a first.” Steve tousled Bobby's hair and looked at the boy with genuine warmth. Gone was the smart-ass grin, the wiseguy guile. At home, with his nephew, Solomon was a different man, Victoria thought.
On the sofa, the boy swiveled up onto his knees and held up his right hand toward Victoria, fanning out his fingers.
“Son-of-a-gun,” Steve said. “He wants to touch hands.”
Victoria raised her right hand and they touched palms and fingers.
“Like with Mom,” Bobby said. “Except no window.”
“Window?” Victoria asked, bewildered.
“Jail visitors' room,” Steve interpreted. “When Bobby was little and his mom was doing time, they'd touch each side of the glass.”
Victoria didn't want to embarrass Bobby by asking about his mother's incarceration. Behind his glasses, there was a sadness and vulnerability in his eyes.
“Please come back,” Bobby said.
“If it's okay with your uncle,” she said.
“Anytime.”
“So long, Solomon,” Victoria said. “Bobby, you're a wonderful kid. Sofia, nice seeing you and your Rudnicks.”
“You bet,” Sofia said.
Steve walked Victoria to the door. “Good luck on the case. If you need any advice, just call.”
Solomon seemed sincere, Victoria thought, stepping into the humid night, heading for her car. What was that she was feeling, her emotions as tangled as raveled wool? A tinge of disappointment, maybe. She was going to miss the sparks that crackled off their crossed swords. She had the strange sense of something ending without ever having begun.
“Victoria, wait,” Steve called out, hurrying down the flagstone path after her.
For a reason she couldn't fathom, excitement buzzed inside her like a bee against a windowpane. What did he want?
Steve handed her a snakeskin Gucci pump. “You forgot this,” he said, then walked back into his house and closed the door.
3. I will never take a drink until sundown . . . two o'clock . . . noon . . . I'm thirsty.
Twelve
THE BIRD-DOGGING, CLIENT-
RUSTLING CASE POACHER
Maybe she'd judged him too quickly, Victoria thought the morning after her visit to Solomon's house. Sure, in court, he was a gunslinger, taking potshots at anything that moved. But at home, he displayed something else altogether. Besides his pecs, she meant.
For all Solomon's flaws, he clearly loved his nephew, and the boy adored him. So few men these days were good candidates for fatherhood. If Solomon could only cure several dozen obnoxious traits, maybe he'd be a decent catch for someone.
Victoria was thinking these thoughts as she drove under a canopy of banyan trees along Old Cutler Road on her way to Katrina Barksdale's house. Giving it some gas, she passed a Gulliver Prep bus, a reckless maneuver on the two-lane road that meandered along the coastline. But time was of the essence, as lawyers were inclined to say. The Grand Jury was in session this morning. Word had leaked out that Katrina would be indicted for murder by Happy Hour. Victoria needed to sign her up and prep her for the forthcoming arrest and booking.
Still rehashing last night, she realized that Solomon had surprised her with something else, too. He'd graciously backed off the Barksdale case. Maybe he wasn't a total shark, after all. Now that she thought of it, there had been other moments when he showed a human side. Hadn't he defended her to Ray Pincher? “She's gonna be really good if you don't squeeze the life out of her.”
And there was Bobby repeating what his uncle had said. “She's pretty and smart and the best rookie lawyer I've ever seen.”
So, upon rehearing, she reconsidered the case of Stephen Solomon, Esq. She'd been too harsh with him. She knew she could be abrasive. Maybe she brought out his worst behavior with her own. Next time she ran into Solomon, she promised herself, she'd apologize and make amends.
As she turned on Casuarina Concourse, her mind settled on the business of the day—State v. Barksdale—and Solomon had no part in it. Would the indictment be for first-degree murder? What was the evidence of premeditation? What was the motive? Which led to another thought, more philosophical than legal. Just why do spouses kill, anyway? It all seemed so foreign to her. Solomon said he had tried more than two dozen murder cases, and now, for a moment, she wished she had handled at least one.
She wanted to appear confident with Katrina, but tension started to creep up her spine. She pictured Ray Pincher holding a press conference just in time for the evening news. Whipping up the media like a lion tamer at the circus. Maybe she should hire a PR firm. Hold her own press conference. Would that even be ethical? She had no framework for a high-publicity trial.
As she headed toward the bay, a soft breeze rustled the fronds on the towering Royal Palms in the grassy median. She passed a dozen postmodern houses, asymmetric concrete boxes gleaming in the morning sun. At the end of the block, sitting on a promontory surrounded on three sides by water, was Casa Barksdale. Victoria drove through an open wrought-iron gate, wended past bubbling bronze fountains, and stopped in front of a seventeenth-century Italian palazzo . . . built in 1998. Her mother, who always fancied ruffles and flourishes, would love this place. A sprawling estate of courtyards and loggias, arches and gazebos, curlicues and ornate designs. Inside were marble stairwells and terrazzo floors, dark wood wainscoting and plaster crown molding. Behind the main house, facing the waterway that opened directly to the bay, a lap pool with a mosaic pattern floor, and a keystone deck. At the tiled dock, the Kat's Meow, a custom Bluewater yacht.
Victoria had been here for several charity events—cocktails and canapés on the deck under an air-conditioned tent. At each, Charles and Katrina had walked hand in hand, moving from guest to guest, offering small talk and thank-yous for helping the zoo or symphony or book fair. Had they gone upstairs later, stripped out of their party duds, and hauled out the kinky paraphernalia?
She'd come to the parties with Bruce, of course. Funny, thinking of him just now. Bruce and kinky paraphernalia didn't usually occupy the same thoughts. Solomon hadn't been far off. Sex with Bruce was fine, though predictable. If they didn't swing from a trapeze, so what? She had no complaints, even if the word that sometimes came to her mind during Bruce's exertions was “workmanlike.” He expelled his breaths in short and steady puffs, as though running the marathon. And like a distance runner, he had stamina. So much, she was often sore by the ten-mile mark.
She had tried a few tactics to speed him up. A tongue in the ear merely tickled him and slowed him down. Changing positions, searching for a new friction point, didn't work either. But marathon runners were preferable to sprinters, to say nothing of guys who couldn't get out of the blocks. Besides, she could teach him, could harness that engine. Bruce so far exceeded Minimum Husband Standards in every other respect, sex was simply not a problem.
As Victoria approached the front door, she straightened her skirt. She'd dressed in one of her favorite work outfits. A Zanella double-breasted, wide-collared brown pinstripe jacket with a matching A-line skirt that fell below the knee. A simple dark brown silk blouse underneath with sensible—if obscenely costly—Prada pumps, a single strap at the ankle. Only the shoes had been purchased new. The rest, which would have cost at least twelve hundred dollars retail, she'd bought for a fifth of that at the consignment shop in Surfside.
She carried a suede briefcase that held a Retainer Agreement she had typed herself. It would formalize her hiring and set her fee. She'd left the amount blank. How much should it be? Enough to pay off the student loans, rent an office, print stationery and business cards, pay a secretary, and still have something left in the bank.
She approached a ten-foot-high door with a scroll design that made her think of a Spanish monastery. She rang the doorbell, and in a moment a Honduran housekeeper, a short squat woman in a white uniform, opened the door. “Te están esperando, señorita.”
They're waiting for you. Victoria's Spanish was passable. In Miami, it had to be. But is that what the housekeeper had said? They?
Her pumps clicking on the mosaic terrazzo of the foyer, Victoria followed the woman. They passed a library with thousands of books, many rare first editions. Charles Barksdale had been both a serious collector and a serious reader and often quoted the classics. Next came the billiard room, and the living room, with its huge Italian stone fireplace. Then out through double doors and into a landscaped courtyard with a covered loggia. She heard the soft gurgle of water from a fountain of spitting cherubs. But another sound, too. A man's laugh. The robust, jovial laugh of a car salesman who's just talked you into that options package you didn't really need. The laugh sounded just like . . .
No, it couldn't be.
They rounded the fountain, and there he was, sitting at a redwood table. Steve Solomon, the sleazy, conniving son-of-a-bitch. He wore a blue sport coat with gold buttons over a pink polo shirt and white slacks.
Gold buttons, pink shirt, white slacks!
Like some banker from Greenwich at the yacht club. Sitting next to him was Katrina Barksdale, laughing with the trill of a mockingbird. Having too damn much fun for a woman about to be indicted. And check out the lipstick-red, low-cut, one-shoulder spandex halter. The slit skirt was white and low on the hips, exposing her bare, tanned midriff at the top and a lot of thigh below. The shoes were strappy slingbacks, and the toenails were the same color as the halter. No, this would not do for booking.
“Vic-tor-ia,” Katrina sang out. “Join us!”
Katrina's makeup was a little heavy for a Monday morning. Her raven hair cascaded over her shoulders and stopped at the top of her creamy white breasts. It gave her the overall look of a hot fudge sundae.
As Victoria app
roached, Katrina crossed her long legs, and the slit slid higher up her thigh. “Victoria, we were just talking about you.”
“Oh, really?” Victoria forced a smile that stopped before it got to her eyes.
She knew that Katrina had started life as Margaret Katherine Gustafson in Coon Rapids, Minnesota. Not that she hid her background. On the contrary, Katrina bragged about each step up. She had twirled flaming batons at halftime at St. Cloud State football games, then took a snow princess act onto skates in a traveling Ice Capades show. According to the bitchy set at La Gorce Country Club, Katrina had supplemented her wages by twirling other batons at night in various hotel rooms along the tour. Then a feathers-and-boobs skating show in Las Vegas, where she met the newly widowed Charles Barksdale, and it was love at first double axel. For him, at least. Victoria preferred to believe that Katrina loved Charles, too, but when a hardscrabble young woman marries an older, wealthier man, questions are raised. Pincher would certainly raise them.
“How clever of you to team up with Stephen,” Katrina said. “He was just telling me about all his exciting trials.”
This couldn't be happening, Victoria thought. She half expected a low-flying gull to drop another load of shit on her.
“Hello, partner.” Steve popped up and pulled out a chair. The perfect gentleman. The perfect, bird-dogging, client-rustling, case-poaching gentleman. Just when she was starting to feel all warm and fuzzy, he had sandbagged her.
Dammit, how could I have been so stupid!
“Iced tea?” Steve asked, reaching for the pitcher even as he slid the chair beneath her. “If my taste buds are in tune, it's passion fruit.”
“Passion fruit it is,” Katrina said. “You have a good tongue, Stephen.”
Good tongue? Did she really say that?
“But perhaps you both want something stronger,” Katrina said.
Even on the precipice of jail, she hadn't forgotten her Gables Estates etiquette. Victoria forced herself to remain calm. “Iced tea's fine.”
“Stephen?” Katrina asked.
“I usually don't imbibe until sundown,” he said. Putting on airs.
