Bluebird Rising

by John Decure

  I walked Duke back to his car, a dented black Toyota Celica that needed a wash sometime last month. We shook hands. Tommy’s was still packing them in, a line ten deep calling out orders to the waiting fry cooks.

  “Thank you, man,” I said. “Anything I can do …”

  Duke’s reflexive quick smile was there, but the eyes were full of dread. “Just don’t call me at work. The atmosphere there’s really wacked right now.”

  I wanted to let him in on my suspicion that someone in management was working both sides of this law center thing, but Duke looked freaked enough for the time being. He started his engine and rolled down his window, then said, “How do you intend to keep me out of this? ’Cause I need my job.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Usually you use your investigator as your source when you mount evidence in a court proceeding, no questions asked.

  “This isn’t even a case yet,” I said, “and the only lawyer involved is already dead. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Not now, at least. Not yet.

  “What about that other guy, your probationer? He’s involved.”

  “Not really. He’s just the dupe whose license got used for the UPL side of it.”

  Duke smirked. “Oh yeah, I’m sure he had no idea. How much did you say they were paying him?”

  I stepped back from the dusty Toyota, eyeing the chrome mud flaps. On a two-door Celica? Now there was a classic Duke Choi touch.

  “Call me,” I said.

  He backed up, put it in drive, and pulled up alongside me as I walked to the Jeep wagon. “I forgot to tell you, Lynn says hi.”

  I nodded and walked on, muttered, “Not with a ten-foot pole, buddy,” too low for anyone to hear me.

  Twenty

  Weeknights are league nights at the Seashore Lanes, so if you want to bowl and aren’t part of the program, you’ve got to get in there and out of there early. Carmen, Albert, and I arrived a little before four. I gave the counter guy an extra ten to put us in lane 1, way over by the wall. That way Albert could roll with his unique two-handed shot-put style with a minimum of embarrassment. The late-afternoon crowd was sparse, maybe five other lanes taken. The nearest bowlers were in lane 6, two thick-necked football jocks and a skinny blond girl with a mouth full of metal, somebody’s kid sister. The guys were perving on Carmen as we headed past them such that I had to stare back until they looked away.

  Carmen knew how good she looked in just jeans and a tee under a black V-necked sweater.

  “Jealous,” she said.

  “Not jealous,” I said. “Proprietary.”

  She held out the fingers on her left hand like a fan, displaying her ring for me. “This doesn’t mean you own me.”

  “You must not have read the inscription inside the band. Paragraph two, line three. With this ring, I thee own.”

  She sighed. “Lawyers.”

  I caught her from behind and squeezed her, tried to kiss her neck and ear. For a second or two, it felt like we were alone together on a date. Until Albert said, “Carmen, c-can I go first?”

  I stopped coming on to her, having learned some time ago that it’s futile to even try to compete. She told her brother absolutely, he could go first. Then she kissed him on the cheek, straightening the collar of his Dodgers warm-up jacket.

  We settled in, and I noticed that distinct bowling alley aroma, a thousand sweaty, rubber-soled insteps behind the cashier’s counter area. Down here in the lanes, the secondary smoke from last night’s action still clung to the furniture. A white banner hung from the ceiling above the rows of pins and said, “Seashore Lanes, Where Friends Come to Bowl.” No friends of mine, I was thinking. We were not two miles from my house, yet I hadn’t set foot inside these walls in probably twenty years.

  The rest of the hanging banner, the part in smaller print, said: “Please Drink Responsibly.” Hey, now there was an idea. Convincing myself that I needed a drink to take the edge off, I said I’d be right back and told Albert he could bowl for me in the first frame. A bar called the Tiki Room was built into the corner of the lobby nearest the parking lot, with smoked-glass windows and a mock awning covered with dead palm leaves ringing the place. The interior was so dark I had to stop in the doorway to adjust. Stepping in from the fluorescent glow of the alley was like falling down a mine shaft, and I could see only the general shapes of patrons recessed against the furniture as I found the bar and ordered. The place was devoid of conversation—just a smattering of Responsible Drinkers getting hammered after work.

  I bought two longneck Buds, a Coke, and a bowl of popcorn to take back with me. As I turned to go, two men at a table in the back caught my eye, their figures pulsing red from a fake tiki torch that was slowly shorting out above their table. The guy in back, facing me, his forehead high, like Dale’s. The other one with his back turned to me, a smaller man, gray hair. I squinted, which helped not at all, thinking: Rudy?

  The bartender, a watchful fat guy with a mirthless face, handed me my change. My hands were too full to do a serpentine weave through a clutter of tables and limbs, and besides, it made no sense that those two would be together, here. Rudy was with Angie again, probably in Glendale. Dale was probably parked down the street in his ratty old Buick, watching them. I eased back out of there and down to lane 1. Albert was up, tiptoeing toward the line for another slow-motion two-hander, the ball rolling with a wobbly hum, eight pins going over like felled trees.

  Carmen clapped. “Yes!”

  “Nice shot, champ,” I said, pulling on my smelly rubber shoes. Albert’s black eyes widened as he mumbled something to himself. He scooted back to the ball return, a smile forming, the first smile I’d seen on his sweet face since the day we went surfing.

  When Carmen and I first met she was taking her brother bowling pretty regularly. Albert liked to bowl but she always chafed against the ritual, sitting indoors on beautiful days, surrounded by dirty ashtrays. I’d sprung her by taking both of them surfing, gave Albert a lesson, with help from my friend Jackie Pace. The session had been an unqualified success, the start of something exotic and new for Albert, who was stoked beyond words. It was a start, as well, for Carmen and me. But now, it seemed, he might not surf again for some time, if at all. These last two years I’d done my share of entertaining Albert with ball games and go-kart rides, miniature golf—the usual. But that stuff was designed to kill an afternoon, nothing more. Riding waves together was something far more challenging and meaningful. It hurt me to think it might be gone.

  “Thought I saw Dale and Rudy up there, in the bar,” I said. Carmen’s brown eyes flashed. “I know, I know. It couldn’t have been them.”

  She took her beer and set it down without drinking from it. “You’re obsessing. I’ve seen you this way enough to know.”

  I took a drink as Albert lined up his next roll. “All I said was I thought I saw them. That’s not obsessing. I haven’t mentioned them all aft—”

  “Shhh. Albert’s up again.”

  Just like that, the mood between us had gone chilly.

  Albert let fly with a shot so slow the ball could’ve left snail tracks. Willing the roll left, left, left, his body contorted into a question mark. His ball nicked the four pin, and pins seven and eight wobbled before they went down. A nice spare. Carmen clapped, as always. I took another drink.

  Obsessing? My ass. I’ll show you obsessing.

  Carmen was next, left the six and ten, then rolled a gutter ball trying to pick up the split.

  I got up and selected a heavy black ball from the rack behind me, lined up, and flung it down the lane with all the frustration of the past week behind it. The pins exploded in every direction, so loudly that the jocks nearby took instant notice. A strike.

  Albert said Good one, J., then got up to take his turn. Carmen didn’t speak until I slid in next to her at the scorer’s table, her black hair covering the sides of her face. I noticed my frame was empty.

  “You’re supposed to put an X right here,” I said.

  But
she stayed perfectly still. “Albert and I are moving back home. This isn’t working out.”

  I tried to hold her hand, but she withdrew it. “Car,” I said, “wait. Don’t decide that now. Dale and Rudy just cleared out. Before them, you know how long I went without having a houseguest?”

  “It isn’t just that.” She shrugged. “Although the packed house certainly didn’t help.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “Look, you know how sorry I am about what happened to your brother. It’s my fault, had I been closer by, no one would have touched him. But it happened. I screwed up.” She was looking way down the lane. “When are you gonna forgive me? When are we gonna get past this?”

  Albert’s next roll had a lot more pop than usual, and he nearly fell over the end line letting it go. Gutter ball. Walking back he hung his head. Suddenly I felt like a jerk for rolling that strike.

  “I don’t know,” Carmen said. “I don’t know.”

  Driving home, we watched the lights along the Pacific Coast Highway pop on all around us, front-lighting a sky at dusk the color of red plums with the skins peeled away. I offered to make bow-tie pasta with sweet Italian sausage, one of Carmen’s favorites. “That sounds nice,” she said. Noncommittal, but it was something. We hadn’t discussed the timing of their departure, but at least they were staying for dinner.

  I stopped at the Food Barn market on Main and ran in alone to pick up a pack of sausage. When I came out again, the air was moist and salty and weighted with the hushed rumble of breaking waves. It was a shadowy night. Smoky clouds puffed their way across a white moon bright with scars. The ATM across the street stood empty beneath the yellow safety light. I thought of the awkward panhandler who’d hit me up for change there on that wet, windblown night not long ago. Maybe the same guy I’d knocked out in the parking lot the day Albert got punched. Something still gnawed at me about the way he and his friends had glared at me when I accused them of doing the deed on Albert. Something inconsistent with everything I knew about exploiters and the way they will delight in their own wickedness, as if it is part of their reward. There was too much indignation in those eyes that morning in the parking lot, not a trace of sadistic swagger in the faces around me as I formulated my patterns of attack and defense. I remembered the girl’s shrill cry from inside the big delivery van. Crying out a name. Kurt.

  I wondered now if the guy was all right, pictured him in a big hospital bed with a girl at his side. Someone to hold his hand, at least.

  Inside the car, Carmen told me I looked terrible. I didn’t want to tell her what was on my mind, so I didn’t say anything.

  The house felt bigger and colder now that Dale and Rudy were gone. I turned up the heater and flipped on some downstairs lights, hoping to improve the atmosphere. Albert got Carmen’s permission to watch Jeopardy and settled in on the living-room carpet with a book about fire trucks of all shapes and sizes. I was in the kitchen, boiling water and mashing up the sausages with a fork, when Carmen answered a knock at the front door.

  “You have a visitor,” she announced with a seen-it-all face.

  Therese Rozypal stood a foot inside the door, as if she feared entering any farther.

  “Hi, J., don’t look so glad to see me.”

  “No, I am. Just, I’m surprised.” I smiled and took her overcoat, a full-length slate gray beauty from Bloomingdale’s. Therese was in a navy dress suit with a white blouse buttoned all the way up, very smart, a black leather portfolio under one arm. Her hair was braided thickly down both sides and tied at the ends with thin blue ribbons. Carmen stood by impassively until I made a forced introduction.

  “We work together,” I heard myself saying, as if that would cover it.

  Therese apologized for arriving without warning but said there were things going on at the bar she felt she had to talk to me about in person. Since she lived in Newport Beach and headed right by here on her way home, well … I thought her justification was a tad too eagerly delivered. Carmen took it in with the poker face she puts on when she studies a situation. I told Therese I was cooking and invited her into the kitchen.

  “She’s beautiful,” Therese said, leaning against the counter. I pulled out a frying pan and put it on the stove.

  “I think so too.”

  “When’s the wedding?”

  I told her we hadn’t yet set a date. “So what’s the bad news from work? My free vacation over?” I wanted to change the subject.

  “Intake has six complaints on Dale Bleeker.” She pulled a handful of documents out of her portfolio. I turned on one of the burners, poured a little oil in the frying pan and set it back down. The papers were complaint summary screens Therese had pulled up on her computer and printed. Each alleged nonperformance on estate planning and bankruptcy filings, and listed Dale’s address as the Glendale Lo-Cost Law Center. Your standard fallout from a UPL operation. All of them mailed in to the bar over the last few days.

  “They probably heard about the fire,” I said.

  She nodded. “That makes sense.”

  I dropped the sausage into the pan. “Thanks for the info.”

  “You’re welcome.” Her blue eyes seemed trapped inside a thought. “I should go. I feel like I’m intruding.”

  I told her she wasn’t, asked her to stay for dinner. Therese said no but let me pour her a glass of burgundy, which she sipped standing up. The sausage gave off a sweet-and-spicy scent as I turned it slowly. “There’s another case,” she said, putting down her glass.

  “Show it to me.”

  “I can’t. I mean, I couldn’t print it without them knowing. There was this classified code, um, next to your name.”

  I stopped stirring and took the sausage off the burner, not sure how it felt to be investigated. Me, investigated, the guy whose job it is to carry a bat on my shoulder against bad lawyers, to take aim and swing on the liars and forgers and cheats and psychos, those who fabricate and obfuscate and misappropriate for a living. I didn’t feel anything but a slow, rising anger in my gut.

  I’m not one of them.

  “You okay, J.?”

  I stirred the sausage some more. “What’s the summary say?”

  “It follows the basic outline of the story the news reported after the fire. You know, that you might have caused it to destroy evidence. To assist a probationer who might have paid you to become involved on his behalf.”

  “Moral turpitude?” That’s the catchall charge for lawyer dishonesty.

  “Multiple acts.”

  “That stuff about Dale paying me, I gotta give it to them, that’s creative.” I slugged down a mouthful of wine. “Has anybody bothered to look at his car? What money?” Christ, that sounded catty. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know. Somebody’s got it out for you right now.”

  “Who’s the complainant, that Glendale police chief, Conforti? His detective, the one who called me and practically told me to go there the night of the fire? Guy knows I came along after and pulled that dirtbag Silver out of there, told me he thinks it was arson and maybe even murder. Conforti took him right off the case.”

  She shook her head. “It was an SBI.” That stands for state bar investigation, which means a case opened from within the office as opposed to a complaint initiated by a member of the public.

  Instantly I knew.

  “Why am I not surprised?” I said. This was Eloise Horton’s longawaited shot at causing me permanent grief. “So, Eloise thinks she’s finally got me on something worse than a late F-due report.”

  “J.,” she said. “It wasn’t Eloise. I checked the reporting codes.”

  “I didn’t know that was possible.”

  She smiled a little. “It is if you know the right people in Intake.”

  I pictured a weak-kneed male complaint analyst gazing up from his keyboard at Therese, teamwork suddenly a hot concept to him.

  “Stanislav Greuber.”

  “He goes by Skip,” I said.

  “I can see why.
Stanislav’s pretty terrible.”

  Skip Greuber, my former manager. Supposedly a friendly face, as recently as a few days ago at Yang Chow. Unless he was just stroking me to find out what I knew.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Eloise is the one who wants my ass on a platter. You’ve seen her in action.”

  “I don’t know,” Therese said slowly. “Eloise is just … Eloise.”

  “Yeah, the original Ice Queen.”

  Therese stared into her wineglass and watched the grapes swish around the edges. Her eyes were pensive and a darker blue just now. “She’s not out to get you.”

  “You don’t consider this out to get me?”

  She paused as if she was trying to gauge something between us. “Here’s the thing,” she said, straightening herself. “You’re a good trial attorney, and she isn’t, but she’s the one who’s supposed to be in charge.” I must not have looked like I was sold, because she added, “Don’t be offended.” Working up to something bigger.

  I dropped the pasta into the boiling water. Max barked outside, reminding me that he was hungry for his dinner.

  “I’ll try not to.”

  “I think you intimidate her. Probably without even knowing it, but you do.”

  I’d never looked at Eloise from that perspective. “She could still be after me. She did suspend me.”

  Therese’s forehead wrinkled just above her eyebrows. “But look how she did it. With full pay.”

  “I can thank my union rep for that.”

  “Maybe, but that was because of how Eloise handled you. That was her response to a situation that had been building up a long, long time. She acted on emotion, not logic or reason. Women do that.”

  Our eyes were on each other briefly, as if we were both considering the subtext of Therese’s words. An imagined scenario rushed forth, and I saw Therese setting down her wine, stepping up to me, her breath sweet and warm, shaking that blond hair loose as her lips sought mine. Hell, I’m engaged, I thought, I wouldn’t grope her for a kiss, but then, what might I do if she was the aggressor? Wouldn’t I be less culpable somehow, a victim of the moment? No, that was crap and I knew it. I couldn’t picture myself in a chair opposite Carmen on the set of some cheesy talk show, explaining to Phil or Sally Jessie how my affair with another woman “just happened” as some outraged housewife the size of a linebacker jeered me from the front row.