Hello, Stranger

by Virginia Swift

  Sally drank the last of her coffee, trying to unfreeze her brain. She needed a new angle on this thing. She was fighting off despair, trying not to think about Charlie Preston losing it and freaking out in her kitchen, now lying in a hospital bed, in God only knows what kind of shape. Fate preyed on women like Charlie from so many directions— physical violence, emotional abuse, poverty and loneliness and the weight of silence. Victims who got accustomed to their vulnerabilities, who adjusted and in the end, embraced their chains. Or as the hallowed Mary Wollstonecraft had put it, they learned to kiss the rod.

  But they weren’t entirely powerless, were they? Even the weakest had their weapons. They learned to avoid and manipulate, to undermine and sabotage. The abuser’s power wasn’t absolute.

  Suddenly Sally realized what she’d been ignoring. Charlotte Preston was hardly the only victim in this situation. At least she was alive. That was a lot more than you could say for Bradley Preston.

  How much did Sally really know about him? Charlie painted him as a deceitful monster. Delice had testified that she’d had to kick his ass when he’d gotten out of hand in her bar. Dave Haggerty and friends considered him a reactionary cutthroat, although Haggerty had been willing to concede Preston’s talent as a lawyer.

  Bea Preston considered her late husband a model husband and moral martyr.

  And to most people, what was he? A solid citizen. A successful corporate lawyer. A political comer. Maybe it was time to pay a little more attention to Brad himself.

  As an advocate for victims of domestic violence, Sally had done her best, and never felt as if it was enough. As a feminist, she’d managed to convince herself that every little thing you did had to count against the grand total. But as a professor, she knew the key to success lay in good research.

  For Sally Alder, libraries were second homes. But law libraries were foreign turf. She needed a guide who spoke the language, so she headed straight for the reference desk.

  The librarian was patronizing, but efficient. Within five minutes, Sally was seated at a computer terminal. She wanted to know what kinds of cases Brad Preston had taken, whom he’d sued and whom he’d defended, when he’d won and lost, what kinds of judgments he’d gotten. Much of that information wouldn’t show up in easily accessible public records—most award judgments happened at the district court level, and those records weren’t published. But she might find something in the State Supreme Court files. Cases from those courts, she’d learned, were published.

  She found two cases from the last five years in which Bradley Preston had acted as counsel, both times coming in after plaintiffs had won judgments at the district level, and the insurance company had appealed. In the first, he’d represented Mammoth Mutual in what had ultimately turned out to be a strange case involving a sixty-two-year-old Laramie man who’d had a drink or two one cold winter night and slipped on the icy sidewalk in front of the bar, breaking his elbow. The guy had sued the bar owner in hopes of getting the insurance company to cover not only his trip to the ER, but six months of disability, claiming he’d been unable to perform his job as a cattle truck driver while he recovered from his injuries. He’d won, but the insurance company had appealed.

  The report of the decision wasn’t very revealing. So Sally ran a search on LexisNexis, found a couple of newspaper articles about the case. Brad had managed to prove that the plaintiff was a drunkard who had repeatedly hurt himself falling down outside bars, that he’d collected on at least one previous slip-and-fall injury, and that he’d evidently been well enough, only two months after the accident, to win a vacation for two to Branson, Missouri, in a horseshoe pitching contest sponsored by a bar two doors down from the one he was suing!

  Sally had to laugh.

  But the second case wasn’t a laughing matter. A ten-year-old child had been brought into a hospital emergency room in Jackson Hole. The parents said they’d taken her skiing, and that she’d fallen off the chairlift. She had three crushed vertebrae, and the doctors had told the mother and father that their daughter might not walk again.

  The parents didn’t like that. They’d insisted on having her airlifted to a Denver hospital. When the news there wasn’t any better, they’d sued the ski resort and the hospitals and everyone else, including the helicopter pilot, for negligence and malpractice. They alleged that the resort had inadequate safety on the ski lift, that the Jackson Hole doctors hadn’t performed standard diagnostic and emergency procedures, and that the delay in proper treatment had been nearly fatal for their daughter, now confined to a wheelchair and in unbelievable pain.

  The district court found for the plaintiffs, to the tune of three million dollars, including the pain and suffering. The hospital had appealed. Sally ran another Lexis search and found a Denver Post newspaper piece about the case, headlined “Defendants Bring in Big Gun in Paralyzed Child Case.” Evidently dissatisfied with the attorney who’d lost the first round, the hospital and its insurance company, once again Mammoth Mutual, had brought in Brad Preston as head of their legal team.

  Court decisions, written in legalese, weren’t intended to be page-turners, in any case, but by the time she’d finally read the Supreme Court decision, she realized that the court records weren’t going to give her much. The Wyoming Supreme Court had heard the appeal, overturned the ruling for the plaintiff, and remanded the matter back to the district court. The judge who’d written the opinion didn’t say much, but it took him thousands of words anyway. Sally found herself nodding off ten minutes into reading his decision. But she was a determined reader, and after all, a historian. She’d written a master’s thesis, a dissertation, any number of books. If you wanted to find out anything interesting, you had to cultivate a taste for the boring. She pinched herself awake again and again, determined to slog through the decision before she indulged herself by searching for the newspaper coverage she was sure there must have been.

  Lexis and Google searches turned up a raft of articles about the case. Brad had won the second trial by introducing new evidence, turning on two points. First, the kid had gotten the best possible treatment at each hospital, and the parents had been given very clear information at every turn. There was, in short, no negligence, no malpractice, nothing but professional, responsible care.

  Second, Bradley Preston had convinced the judge that not only were the parents not being victimized by the doctors and hospitals, they were essentially evil people who ought to be facing criminal charges. Brad had been able to convince the judge that the victim had not sustained an accidental fall from the chairlift at all. There was reason to believe that the child might have been pushed by her mother, sitting next to her.

  Jesus Christ.

  The parents, it turned out, were the kind of people who made a habit out of living on what Sally’s father used to call “if-come.” They’d been playing the float on their credit cards, spinning out lines of credit on their home equity, paying a little on this debt, a little on that, for years. Their Cherry Hills mansion, their country club memberships, their Beamers and time-shares in Maui and Nantucket were leveraged to the eyeballs. They’d been desperate. And desolate. And the daughter had been adopted.

  People sucked.

  “Some people do,” said Hawk, when she told him what she’d learned. “Not everybody. Not me or you. And from what you’re telling me, it looks like even Bad Brad had at least one good point. Sure, he probably spent most of his time defending corporate greedheads, and from what we know from Charlie, he was a bastard and a brute of a father. But he didn’t like fraud. He was relentless about tracking it down. You’ve got to admire that, in a way.”

  “I guess so. But it throws me. This guy’s one big seething kettle of contradictions. How could he treat his own daughter the way he did, and then go out and tell the Rocky Mountain News that he’d felt he had to get to the bottom of what had happened to the kid in the case because ‘sometimes, parents aren’t very parental’?”

  “Maybe it was guilt,” said Hawk. �
��It’s not impossible. He might have been trying to make up for all the terrible things he’d done in private by crusading in public. And it’s not like his private behavior was all that consistent either. This was a guy who got out of control with his kid, then wept and moaned and bought her a sports car. He was all over the map.”

  Who wasn’t? Nobody was only one thing. Everybody on the great green planet Earth had complicated feelings, secret urges, sudden desires to do something wrong or make everything right. Which meant that however much you might want to trust somebody, you were better off maintaining at least a grain of suspicion. It was the only way not to get hurt.

  A person like Charlie Preston had plenty of cause to be more than a little defensive and cynical. The wonder was that she trusted anyone at all. She’d reached out to Aggie Stark, and to Billy. What did they have in common, Sally wondered, beside being kids? One seemed secure, well loved, confident. The other was pretty much a lost cause. They’d both accepted Charlie for what she was—that must be a big factor. But was there something else? Some hidden affinity? Some darker congruence?

  Sally looked at Hawk. She’d never known anyone better. Nobody knew her better. And yet, she didn’t tell him everything, didn’t give him access to her whole soul. She’d never mentioned the buzz that she sometimes felt between Scotty Atkins and her, for example. And she was certainly giving him very skimpy information about her encounters with Dave Haggerty. She didn’t want to wonder why.

  Hawk was the straightest shooter she knew, but could she ever know him completely? What might he be hiding from her? The thought was disturbing. And arousing.

  She looked at him again. What was he thinking? He reached across the kitchen table and took her hand. “Let’s eat,” he said. “I’m starving.”

  Chapter 16

  Making a Killing

  “Money,” said Edna McCaffrey when she called at eight the next morning.

  “Money’s good,” Sally said, yawning. She and Hawk had enjoyed a long, interesting night.

  “More money’s better,” said Edna. “How’s the donor cultivation going?”

  Sally took the phone away from her ear, stared at the receiver. “Don’t you ever think about anything else?” she asked.

  “Nope,” said Edna. “We live in the era of privatization, girlfriend. We used to pay for public education through taxes. Now we cut taxes so the rich can keep all their obscene profits, beg them to think of a basic service as a ‘giving opportunity,’ and then have to slobber all over them when they throw us a bone. The provost wants me to start selling classrooms as naming opportunities.”

  “Where will it end?” asked Sally.

  “Am I going to be writing on blackboards with the Rockefeller Memorial Chalk?”

  “How about the Haggerty Reading Room of the Dunwoodie Building?” Edna replied.

  Sally skirted the question. “I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

  “So I hear,” said Edna. “You need some stress relief. Come to my yoga class this afternoon. The teacher’s a genius.”

  Classic Edna move: an order in the form of an invitation. But she and Edna could have a nice glass of pinot noir after. “What time and where?” Sally asked.

  Edna’s yoga studio turned out to be in a strip mall on the eastern edge of town. The parking lot was full of gleaming SUVs and European sedans, disgorging well-preserved middle-aged people wearing spandex pants, carrying rolled-up neoprene mats and plastic water bottles. Edna met her at the door, carrying her own mat and a spare. She flashed a plastic ID card at an attendant, who scanned the card and pressed a button releasing the lock on an electronic gate. Edna pushed through, and they headed for the yoga room. Sally reflected on the quantity of petrochemicals and fossil energy and techno-gadgetry required to fuel Americans’ desire to seek life on a higher plane than crass materialism afforded. Fill ’er up, bodhisattva.

  They got to the door of the studio. There were dozens of pairs of shoes lined up outside. Edna slipped off her Cole Haans, setting them neatly against the wall by the door. Sally followed suit with her skanky old Rockport clogs. Looked like lots of people had discovered the genius of Edna’s yoga teacher. Inside the room, the mats were lined up and jammed in so tightly, Sally bet the yogis and yoginis risked punching each other in the mouth every time they opened up for sun salutes. Nirvana on the assembly line.

  Sally wondered where the hell she and Edna were going to squeeze in, but some yoga friend of Edna’s beckoned them over, in a show of spiritual generosity, and then proceeded to harangue the people around her until they each moved an inch and a half, making room, just barely, for two more people on two more mats. Sally heard some grumbling, but most of them simply shifted and went back to their warm-up lunges and bends and downward-facing-dog poses. Sally was a little surprised to discover that, instead of giving themselves over to deep breathing, getting into the yoga groove, a lot of them were gossiping madly as they twisted and stretched.

  “She’s just furious,” said the woman next to Sally, decked out in flared gray pants and a red halter top silkscreened with a color picture of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god. “She bought that house and spent the next six months pouring money into fixing it up—you know the neighborhood. Right near the university, big old Victorians mixed right in with crummy little cottages and ranch houses and brick bungalows. Doesn’t matter what. Some of them are in pretty bad shape, some of them chopped up into apartments, but people are snapping them up and the values are shooting through the roof. I just sold a place there for three-fifty.”

  Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars? In Laramie? What was it, the Taj fucking Mahal of Albany County?

  “Yeah. That property around UW is really heating up. A client of mine got in just in time. Bought a shitty little clapboard bungalow on a funny-shaped lot around Fourteenth and Custer, gonna tear it down,” said her neighbor, a woman with striking silver hair, talking very nearly to her own knees as she folded herself in three pieces. “Wants to build something about five thousand square feet. It’ll fill up the lot, but she doesn’t care. She’s thinking Spanish medieval—wrought iron, tile roof, turrets, all that crap. She’s used up three architects.”

  Yoga and real estate? Where did they think they were, California?

  “There’s a hell of a lot of money to be made just flipping the property,” said the woman in the Ganesh halter. “But you’ve gotta be there when it’s happening. It’s like . . .” She darted a glance at Sally, who got very busy contemplating her navel. “The woman I was telling you about,” she continued. “She gets this place all fixed up, and then her next-door neighbor goes and dies, and the son rents it to a bunch of students—students! With a twelve-month lease! So now here she is, sitting in her gazillion-dollar remodel, next to a rental unit with cars parked on the front lawn and rap music blasting out of the windows. They’re building a huge pyramid of beer cans on the front porch, which is strange, she says, because what do they need with cans? They keep a keg out there on a permanent basis, so that all their pals can stop by and party any time. It’s like living on the banks of Beer River.”

  “Can’t she get them kicked out as a nuisance or something?” said the silver-haired woman.

  “The landlord won’t cooperate. Says they’re paying the rent, and college kids have to live somewhere, and after all, they’ve got a right to a little fun. Says it’s his property, and he’ll do with it what he damn well pleases. But he said he’d try to get them to turn down the music, or whatever you call that stuff. I think he’s broke and needs the rent money.”

  “That’s so irresponsible,” said her friend.

  Yeah. Really irresponsible to be broke, thought Sally. And to offer students a place to live near school, maintaining the illusion that it actually might be a college neighborhood. All those frivolous and unsightly people, screwing up property values for the upright classes. It was a travesty.

  “What can you do?” said the Ganesh woman. “She’s not pushing it for now.”
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br />   “She might as well back off,” said silver hair. “Every-body with any cash to spare is trying to get in now anyway. In the next few years, those neighborhoods will be so over-priced, owners like the guy next door will be cashing out before they go bankrupt trying to pay the property taxes. The renters will be forced out. You’ve got to take the long view.” She lay on her back, cradling her knees, rocking slightly and slowing down her breathing.

  And where would the renters go? Would students have to start commuting from West Laramie, or maybe Cheyenne? The whole thing chapped Sally’s butt. She’d moved to Laramie from L.A. precisely because it was a sweet little college town, an ideal place to get away from runaway greed and class warfare. Wyoming had its own problems, of course (livid rednecks, despoilers of desert and mountain), but at least they were homegrown. The old Gem City looked like it was about to get seriously Californicated.

  “Let’s get started,” said a gorgeous, blue-eyed woman, standing on a mat at the front of the room, smiling very slightly.

  It was probably horrible karma to start out a yoga session in a snit, but to Sally’s amazement, her rotten mood didn’t last long. An hour and a half later, she’d been put through the Triangle and the Warrior, prepared for the Pigeon, balanced on one foot with her arms in a knot, stood on her head, and spent a restorative ten minutes flat on her back in Corpse Pose. She’d gotten a hell of a lot more of a workout than she’d expected. By tomorrow, she’d be slamming ibuprofen and finding aches in muscles she hadn’t known she had. But at this moment, she felt loose, strong, and completely blissed out. Edna was right—the teacher was a genius. Sally thought about getting some spandex clothes in Hindu god prints.

  And then, to her amazement, the Realtors took up right where they’d left off as they rolled up their mats.

  “Listen,” said Ganesh woman. “I’m going to call you this afternoon about a property on Fetterman that may be available next month. There were renters, but they’ve gotten them out. It’s a little run-down, but great location.” She was about to continue when she noticed Sally. “We’ll talk about it later,” she said to her friend, tossing a glance in Sally’s direction. Both women glared at her.