Unfit to Practice

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “You all right, Bob?”

  “It’s not broken. I can walk.” Nina started to help him up, but he shook her off. “Leave me alone, Mom.”

  They walked, or in Bob’s case, hobbled, down the hill to the car, where Nina found her first-aid kit. By the time she bandaged the wound, Bob had established a policy of silence, which he somehow maintained through the stinging, painful cleansing regimen.

  They rode back without even the soothing effects of music. Nina turned on NPR, and they listened to Bob Edwards telling, in his earnest round voice, the latest disheartening world news. By the time they reached Caesars, Paul was happy to say good-bye, although sorry for Nina. They got out while Bob stayed in the car, and walked a short distance away.

  “What happened up there?”

  “He was fine until I told him he couldn’t go to ‘band practice’ this afternoon at Nikki’s. I made up an excuse but he saw through me, which upset him. He suddenly decided to leave the trail and climb a steeper part of the hill. I told him to stop, it was too steep. Then he fell, which humiliated him.”

  “Humiliated?”

  “You can’t imagine how much he looks up to you, Paul. He didn’t want you to see him.”

  Touched, Paul said, “I’ll take him out sometime and teach him a few things.”

  “I don’t want him rock climbing.”

  “He’s getting older, Nina. It’s a safe sport if he learns right. I started at about his age.”

  “Sure. He can spend the nights with Nikki and the days risking his neck. Why not? He’s a big thirteen years old!”

  Paul said gently, “He’s going to grow up with or without you, honey.”

  “You don’t understand,” Nina said with that fierce note in her voice, and Paul did understand that he’d better back off or she might kick him out of the stepfather competition. He was feeling a certain solidarity with the kid, and she didn’t like that. Did “stepfather” mean being a yes-man for the mother? He experienced a moment of doubt about Nina. She was too driven and too protective of the kid.

  She made a good boss, though, and unfortunately he was in love with her. He had wanted to do some serious talking about their future the night before, and it didn’t look like the opportunity would come again soon. “I’ll call you after I speak with Ali,” he said.

  He set out up the road toward Meyers, the next town over on the California side of the lake.

  The Peck family owned some acreage on a side street off South Upper Truckee Road. Consulting his map and watching for a crooked wooden sign Ali had described, he arrived at the house at a few minutes after noon. U-shaped, with an open grassy courtyard in front, the house stepped down a hill on the backside and must have had some expansive glass in back for admiring the craggy landscape beyond. He looked forward to a peek inside, but as it turned out, he had no opportunity.

  Ali Peck waved him over to the side of the house. She had a split stack of wood beside her on the left, a few short logs to the right, and a two-foot log set up lengthwise on a low stump. As he walked over, she gave it a smack with a long-handled ax. The log fell open like the O.E.D. She threw the two pieces toward the split pile, then started in on another one. “Hang on,” she said, “I’m almost done.”

  She wore jeans and a V-necked T-shirt that read One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, Floor. He watched her shoulders work. He could see her appeal. Youth, pep, spirit-she had it all, and if he could see that in a few strokes of the ax, imagine what riding with her day after day must have shown Kevin.

  She stopped, set the ax against the stump, removed gloves, and wiped her hands on her jeans. “I won’t shake,” she said. “Blisters.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Yeah. You can call me Ali if I can call you Paul.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t know what you expect to get out of me. This mess with Kevin has been such a pisser.” She pushed hair away from her face, and Paul noticed she had not broken a single nicely manicured fingernail.

  “Your parents around, Ali?”

  “They do a big grocery shop on Saturday afternoon. I don’t want them involved.”

  A careful and mature young lady, Paul thought. And it made things easier for him. “Looks like you do a lot of that.”

  “Two cords a season. My father chops the other two cords. He’s a karate instructor. Do you want to sit down? How long is this going to take? I’m willing to do this one last thing for Kevin, whatever loose ends you’re here to take care of, but tell Kevin I won’t be taken by surprise again. I’ll be out of state when the permanent-custody hearing comes around. I’m not going to go through another court scene. So embarrassing. I don’t specially like hurting my first lover, you know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To spend the spring at my aunt’s ranch in Arizona. It’s too hot for me here in the mountains at the moment. I’m a scandal.” She laughed. “I just hope all this doesn’t ruin my career in law enforcement.” She sat down on a smooth rock in the yard and Paul sat on a log beside her. The yard, Tahoe style, had been left natural. The well-spaced pines and the soft lawn of needles made it look like a nature preserve.

  “You may still get subpoenaed,” Paul said. “Even in another state. There are ways.”

  “I’ll get a better lawyer if I have to. Can we get this over with? I heard that Kevin lost the hearing. He really loves his kids. It’s too bad.”

  “How did it happen? You and him, I mean?”

  Her eyebrows went up and she smiled. For once she looked her age. “It just happened. We were alone a lot. I was helping him right down to assisting in the apprehension of suspects. I know cadets aren’t supposed to be put in harm’s way but things happen fast. We became like real partners who trust each other totally. Sometimes we went on stakeouts and we’d tell each other all about our lives. Kevin was miserable with his wife. He finally broke down and told me.” She glanced at Paul.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot how old you are. I need to make a note,” Paul said.

  “Yes, legally I was underage. Kevin worried about that all the time. We had to be incredibly careful. He might be fired. Has he been disciplined?”

  “There’s an investigation.”

  “He has to be in trouble. Everybody knows about us now. At least I fended off that statutory-rape garbage. My father wanted to go to the police but I wouldn’t let him. After it came out, they decided not to prosecute, because I wouldn’t cooperate. The fact is, we were in love. We were two adults and what we did was our own business.” She had a clear, intelligent way of talking. Maybe someday she would become a police officer, but she had some work to do on her judgment first.

  “I’m confused,” Paul said. “Did Kevin and his wife split up because of the affair?”

  “No! Absolutely no way could she know about it. They were living together the whole time. This custody issue hadn’t come up. But we were in love. Kevin was everything to me. I planned to marry him.”

  “So the two of you talked about marriage?”

  “Sure. He wanted to marry me, too, but he wanted to be sure he’d get the kids. I wasn’t sure what I wanted except that I wanted him.”

  “So did Kevin tell his wife he wanted to separate while you two were still, ah, in the relationship?”

  “No. We almost got to that point. We had plans. Go to Alaska, if you want to know. I was there two years ago on an Outward Bound kayaking trip. It was an excellent place. My parents wouldn’t like me going, but they would respect my rights. But it never got to that point.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, we had been together about three months. We were patrolling the condo area up at Ski Run around eleven at night in a snowfall. We had a big talk. Kevin told me, okay, Ali, this is it, I’m going to tell her tomorrow. And we’re going to go to Alaska and start over, and I’ll bring my kids and we’ll get jobs and live in a cabin and do some hunting and trapping. He had finally come around to what I wanted. We had sex in the patr
ol car. I fibbed in court when I said we never did it there, incidentally. Then I went home and went to bed.”

  “I see,” Paul said. He checked her face again. Was she truly eighteen, or some hard-nosed mama of forty?

  Ali did that smile again, the smile with the eyebrows up that made a sort of facial shrug. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s how close I came. But then when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep. I thought stuff like, we don’t have any money, how do we get to Alaska? And I don’t like doing dishes or anything, so do I want to take care of kids? All of a sudden, you know, this lightning bolt hit me and I fell out of love. Like this.” She snapped her fingers. “All of a sudden I couldn’t understand what I ever liked about Kevin.

  “He has no ambition. He’s actually kind of passive except when it comes to his kids. The truth is that I initiated everything. He liked being dragged along. And the sex was good but he was only my second boyfriend and there was this cute exchange student from Sofia-that’s in Bulgaria, in case you were wondering-at school who I was starting to think about, like, you know, what a shame. He’s soulful. He wants to be a writer. You know?”

  “I know.” He thought back to a beautiful artist he knew once.

  She shook her head wonderingly. “I felt like I had been sick with flu and just suddenly got over it. I searched my soul that night and I realized I didn’t want to go to Alaska. I knew it was over. Has that ever happened to you?”

  “Not since I was seventeen,” Paul said.

  “Are you saying I’m immature? Because-”

  “No, no. I have no problem with that.”

  This magic sentence always worked. Ali’s defensiveness dissolved and she said with a trace of boastfulness, “So that was my love affair. Is that all you wanted to ask me about?”

  “Not exactly. Although you have been very frank and helpful.”

  She nodded and said, “Anything I can do.”

  “What I need to know is how you ended up getting subpoenaed.”

  “I explained that to Kevin when he called. And incidentally, tell him not to call again. I’m with somebody else.”

  And I bet that somebody else writes beautiful love letters in Cyrillic script, Paul thought. “Explain it to me one more time.”

  “Simple. The phone rang last Friday morning about seven. My parents talked to this lawyer named Riesner, Lisa’s lawyer. He told them he’d heard Kevin and I had been involved in a serious sexual relationship. They didn’t believe it at first. It shocked them quite a bit when I admitted it. I hated it coming out that way. I felt bad that I hadn’t told them before on my own, so that wasn’t fun. There was some shouting, you know how it is. Then a little later someone came to the door, a grungy-looking man wearing a wrinkled flowered shirt looking lost. At that point, my parents weren’t in any shape to answer, so I did. He said, ‘Ali Peck?’ I said, ‘How’d you know my name?’ He handed me some papers and I said, ‘Listen, pal, I’m sorry, I already go to the Lutheran church,’ and he said, ‘It’s a subpoena, dollface. Read it and weep.’

  “My parents read it and they called their lawyer. He said I was a witness in Kevin’s hearing that same day and he could get the hearing continued if I wanted but eventually I’d have to tell the truth because now Lisa knew. I said I might as well get it over with even though I was plenty nervous. Then I needed to talk with my parents for a long time, explain everything until they understood. After that discussion, my parents said they respected my need to live my own life.”

  So sixties, thought Paul.

  “So our lawyer talked to Lisa’s lawyer and gave me advice on how to testify and what they were going to ask me. The whole experience was pretty gross. Very embarrassing, but the worst thing was knowing I was hurting Kevin. But I couldn’t lie about the big stuff. That would be perjury.”

  Paul made some notes, looked at the healthy radiant girl in blue jeans with the bright future, and said, “Just wondering. Why didn’t you call Kevin before the hearing? A little advance warning. That sort of thing.”

  “I had a lot going on! My parents upset. A trig test I might miss. Kevin would have cried, too. He wouldn’t have even thought about my feelings. About how I, an innocent party, got sucked into this ugly custody hearing.” She picked up the ax and ran her finger along the edge.

  “This subpoena came as a complete shock to you.”

  “Yes. Kevin said Lisa’s lawyer sort of implied that I called him and told him about us. That’s a complete lie.”

  Paul closed his notebook. “Just one more little thing I need to go back to, Ali. You said that Lisa Cruz never knew about the affair until the time you were subpoenaed.”

  “No one knew. Kevin would never have told her.”

  “You’re a woman of the world,” Paul said. “Obviously you’re no fool. Don’t you think Lisa might have figured it out? Maybe from Kevin’s attitude, or his lack of interest in her-”

  “She kicked him out of her bed and for some reason expected him to stick by her. She drove him crazy, starting up one manic lifestyle racket after another, then, when it didn’t fix her life or make her happy, she turned off like a run-down battery toy. I really think he tried to make her happy for a long time, but she’s one of those people who’s so self-absorbed, she barely registered him.”

  Paul nodded. He stood up just as a Ford Explorer rolled into the driveway. Paul passed the man and woman inside on his way to the Mustang out front. “It’s okay, Mom,” Ali called.

  Like their daughter, the Pecks practically vibrated good health, but they looked nervous. He would be, too, if he had Ali for a daughter.

  After his visit with Ali, Paul stopped in at the South Lake Tahoe police station to check out the Bronco theft investigation. As soon as he walked into the building, old, familiar sensations assaulted him, which quickly overrode his well-being.

  He hadn’t fit into the San Francisco Police Department from the beginning. Following a beer or two, when he felt insightful, he sometimes reflected that the cause of his unease there was not only a generalized problem with granting any idiot authority over him. His problem was also with specific idiots, the officious ones that seemed to have an almost military need to break his spirit and create the right kind of soldier. He irked them. They irked him. And one day, after a series of incidents, rather than granting him yet another promotion in Homicide, he was fired for insubordination.

  Now, just over forty, entering what should be his maturity, he still got riled at the signs ordering this and that, the stone-faced officer on duty, the vigilant questions, the general militaristic smell of the place. But he disguised his prejudices, gave a pleasant smile to the cop at the desk, and asked to see one of the officers who had responded to the theft of Nina’s Bronco.

  After turning his ID this way and that, as if to make better sense of it from a different angle, the cop said, looking closely at Paul, “Officer Scholl’s on duty,” buzzing the inner sanctum. Officer Scholl came out and asked him to walk her over to her car. She was going off duty now, and was dressed in a red turtleneck sweater over slacks and ankle boots, civilian clothing that flattered her stocky body.

  They walked out together into the damp mountain world, where breezes whispered softly, and plump, new, green acorns on a huckleberry oak shrub made the ugliness of human behavior in a place like this so much more difficult to stomach than in any given urban slum.

  “There’s nothing to report,” Scholl told him with a frown after he explained his mission.

  “Any progress on the missing files?”

  “Nope.”

  The speed in her step made him rush to keep up. “Things have been happening in these cases that suggest-a possibility that someone is using information from the files.”

  She stopped, turned to face him, and put her hands on her hips. “What things?”

  “Sorry. I can’t discuss the specifics.”

  “Huh. You people.” She took off again. They reached her car, a midsized family sedan. She pushed a button on a keyring remot
e to click the lock open. “Doesn’t matter that we can’t do our job, doesn’t matter if people may get hurt, must keep the lying client’s secrets.”

  Frustration overrode all other feelings. “Officer, we need those files back.”

  “You’re a real one-note samba.”

  “I know you don’t have the best opinion of Nina Reilly. But she appreciates your getting her vehicle back, and says you’ve been very professional in your dealings with her.”

  “My personal feelings don’t interfere with my job.”

  “Exactly what I’m saying. I’m glad you were able to put your differences aside and find her Bronco.”

  “You have new information I can use?”

  Paul was silent.

  “Of course you don’t. We got the vehicle back, that saved her a bundle, but now some backseat litter’s missing, which no one will describe. Well, that’s just tough, isn’t it? Tough for us, tough for her.” She opened the car door. “Mr. van Wagoner, I’m off duty. I’ve got better things to do than to listen to you grumble about this problem not getting priority over the dozens of other cases we’re handling.”

  “Listen, I’m aware you have bigger trouble in this town than a defense attorney’s missing papers. I was a cop.”

  “I know,” she broke in. Seeing his surprise, she said, “You think in a little town like this when a city type like you comes nosing around we aren’t interested? You run an investigative agency in Carmel, which has business when it wants it. You’ve been coming up here for a couple of years now, working mostly for Nina Reilly and only occasionally for other private clients. You were fired from the SFPD years ago. You went to work for the Monterey Police Department and that didn’t work out either. You have a buddy on the force here, Sergeant Fred Cheney. He speaks well of you or I wouldn’t be standing here.”

  “How is he?”

  “Working too hard.”

  “So what you’re saying is-”