The Arraignment

by Steve Martini

  “Don’t say anything about what?” I ask.

  “Oh, we were just talking.” He has one knee on the floor, next to her chair, holding her hand, looking at me, wondering how much I might have heard outside the door.

  Dana pulls herself together, sits upright in the chair. She takes a deep breath, now the full-bodied flesh of her former shadow. Color back in her face. I hand her the glass and she sips a little water. She gathers a little condensation with two fingers from around the outside of the glass and wipes it gently across her forehead. Takes some more and hits her neck and chest just above the bodice of her blouse.

  Whatever it was that sent her spinning, Nathan has pulled her out of it.

  “I don’t know what it was,” she says. “I just felt a little faint.” She sips from the glass again.

  “What is it you needed to talk to her about?” Nathan suddenly seems to be in charge. “Is it something that can wait until tomorrow?” he asks. “I think maybe I should get her home.”

  “It’s a serious matter,” I tell him. “But if it has to wait one day, I suppose it can.”

  “Good,” he says.

  “I’ll just have to call and tell them.”

  Nathan leans toward me, almost saying it but he doesn’t: “Tell who?”

  Dana’s eyes glance up at me, as I pass her and walk to the side of my desk, where I stop and face her. Even in her withered state, she is a bubble of anxiety, filled with questions she doesn’t really want to ask but is unable to resist.

  “No.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m feeling better,” she says. “I’d like to know what it is.” She’s holding the icy glass of water to her forehead now.

  “It has to do with the law firm,” I tell her. “Rocker, Dusha.”

  She looks at me for a full second, then her eyes close and she expels a breath. When she opens her eyes to look at me again, I suspect she knows what I’m talking about. But the sideways glance she shoots toward Nathan causes me to wonder if he does.

  To resolve any doubt, I tell her: “They have a few questions regarding some of the accounts that Nick managed before his death.”

  “Oh.” Her parched lips open a little, head nodding slowly. “I see. I’m feeling better,” she says. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should discuss this in private. After all, it is business relating to Nick’s firm.” She leans toward Nathan who still has one knee on the floor beside her. “Would you mind?” she says.

  Suddenly Fittipaldi is the man standing out in the cold. “Sure.” What else can he say?

  “You’re a dear,” she says.

  “If you need me, I’ll just be outside the door.”

  Probably on his knees with his ear to the wood.

  She lets his hand slip slowly out of hers, and he leaves the office, closing the door behind him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” I ask.

  “I’m much better,” she says.

  Instead of sitting in the chair behind my desk I move around front and settle one cheek onto the edge of the desk, looking down at her in the chair.

  “What was it you thought I was going to tell you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do I mean?” I smile. “When you went all light-headed on us and almost flattened my ficus bush behind the chair there.”

  She smiles at the little joke I’ve made. “I don’t know. I just suddenly felt faint.”

  “You seemed to be feeling just fine a few minutes ago, ready to do battle with the insurance company. Until I told you that wasn’t why I called you in here. That it was something else, something more serious. What did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” She looks at the wall in one direction, then the other. Her eyes everywhere but on me.

  “But you know why I called you here now, don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure.” She offers up a mystified expression, but she’s sweating, the first time I have ever seen Dana perspire. She has the glass to her forehead again, hoping to cover it with condensation, while she licks the gloss off her lips.

  “Think about it,” I tell her. “Or maybe we should call Nathan back in?”

  “No,” she says.

  “I thought so. He doesn’t know about the trust account checks, does he?”

  She brings the glass from her forehead to her lap, so that she has something to focus on down low, away from my searching stare. She shakes her head quickly as if this might make the admission less painful.

  “Tell me, did you do the checks before or after you started holding hands with Nathan?”

  She shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. She doesn’t want to say.

  “You thought I was going to tell you that the police wanted to talk to you about Nick’s death, wasn’t that it? I suppose that would tend to move all the blood into someone’s feet. I mean if the news seemed to be coming at you all of a sudden like that, and if you’d been thinking about the possibility for a while.”

  She looks up. “Why would they want to talk to me? They already talked to me, right after it happened. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Yes, you do. You thought they might be looking at you. Thinking about the youthful widow, married to a man who was married to his job, a lawyer who, according to you, even with the work ethic of a Puritan, wasn’t doing all that well financially. You could see how the cops might be thinking about all that insurance money and how two million dollars might go a long way to soothe the loss of a loved one.

  “Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” I tell her. “The police and their narrow little minds, always filled with distrust. But I’m afraid that’s a genetic deficiency we will both have to deal with. It’s one of the conditions of employment in the police force. And a real pain in the ass if you’re in my line of work.”

  She looks up at me and smiles, the first note that I might be on her side after all.

  “Still, anybody with a reasonable mind might wonder about all the ways a young woman such as yourself might find to spend that kind of money. That was it, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure,” she says. “But you’re right about the police. They’re very suspicious about everything. Who knows what goes on in their heads?”

  “But, why would they be thinking all those thoughts?”

  “I don’t know that they are,” she says. “You’re the one who brought it up.”

  “Guess I did, didn’t I? Fine. Let’s talk about something else.”

  A look of relief in her eyes, a different direction.

  “Let’s talk about what Nathan didn’t want you to tell me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was standing outside the door with the glass of water?”

  This is not the direction she hoped for. “Paul, listen.” Her soothing tone turns to honey, sweet and running fast, like something off a hot stove. “I’m really not up to this right now. I’m not exactly feeling well.”

  “Feeling faint again, are we?”

  “Well. Just a little,” she says.

  “Want to try another subject?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “Let’s talk about the law firm, Rocker, Dusha. They have a difficult decision to make now. What to do with all those client trust account checks that somebody else wrote, drawing down Nick’s fees? Unearned fees,” I tell her. “I mean, they may have to service some clients and not get paid, since somebody else already took the money.”

  “What else can they do?” she says.

  “Well, let’s see.” I rub my chin as if this takes some thinking, which it doesn’t. “I suppose they’d have a handwriting expert examine the signatures on those checks. From what I’m told, it looks like the same signature on all of them. So that won’t be hard. Then they’d go hunting for suspects, get exemplars, signatures from those suspects. Well, you can see where this leads?”

  “How would they find suspects?” she says.

  “Well, they have the accounts where the c
hecks were deposited. The bank tellers are likely to remember a face, even if somebody else’s social security number was used.”

  She just swallows this, making me suspect that perhaps she used disguises.

  “But, I don’t think finding the person who did it would be a problem for them. In fact, I think they already know who it is.”

  “How?”

  “The person wasn’t that careful taking the checks out of Nick’s drawer,” I tell her.

  Her eyes get big. This shuts her up.

  “Then comes the hard part. They have to make a decision.”

  She’s waiting, anxiously.

  “One, they could take the money out of whatever source of funds this person might have. Say for example, some lucrative insurance settlement. You know, try to sweep the whole thing under the carpet. Avoid the embarrassment to the firm. That is, if they can move fast enough to keep the State Bar from turning it into an open investigation.”

  I can almost see her eyes do a little nod on this one, the corners of her mouth turning up just a little in approval.

  “Or, number two, they could turn the checks over to the district attorney’s office, file charges for forgery and theft, and leave it in the D.A.’s hands. Now that, that last one is the cleaner course of action. It’s the one any good lawyer would probably recommend. That’s the one that doesn’t get them in any trouble with the bar. They just lose a little public face, some P.R.”

  Corners of her mouth down again.

  “Of course, with all those suspicious little minds and nothing else to do down at the police department, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an epidemic of paranoia sweep through the place if the D.A. were to get his hands on those checks, depending, that is, on who signed them.

  “In which case, I suppose we might have to show a little understanding for those with wayward minds who might be misled into thinking that you had a reason for wanting Nick to die a sudden death.

  “I mean, what with all those checks bearing Nick’s name in somebody else’s signature, the full-court press on the insurance company for a couple of million, and you riding around town next to Dudley out there, the two of you with the top down sitting on jaguar pelts. I mean you have to admit, it does beat grieving.”

  “You make it sound so . . .” she searches for the word.

  “Tawdry?” I say.

  “Selfish,” she says.

  “That’s a good word. I mean not good, but, well, I think you understand what I mean. So. Now.” I lift the other cheek onto my desk so that I’m sitting completely on it, my feet dangling a few inches above the floor directly in front of her. “Before I have to call Adam Tolt back and talk to him about which direction the firm might want to go, why don’t you tell me what it was that Nathan didn’t want you to mention when I was standing outside the door?”

  She sits there wide-eyed, considering her options: door number one, carpet sweeping; door number two, some serious felonies for forgery and theft with some probable time, and some good points toward motivation on a double murder. Her response, which takes a nanosecond, tells me this is not a hard choice.

  “We had been seeing each other,” she says, “for some time. Nathan and I.”

  “I am stunned.”

  “I mean before Nick died.”

  “You mean before he was shot, killed?” I say. “There is a difference.”

  “Yes. That’s what I mean.” She corrects herself.

  “If Nick died of pneumonia in a hospital with Metz in the bed next to him, the police wouldn’t be looking under every rock for the people who shot them. They’d just figure God did it, and you’d be free to hold hands with Nathan as if nothing happened. You do see the difference?”

  She looks at me with a bitter expression. “We didn’t tell the police about it. We didn’t think they needed to know. It was private.”

  “And now you’re worried they’ll find out,” I finish the thought for her.

  She nods.

  “How? The two of you having been so discreet?” I say.

  “Oh, stop it,” she says.

  “No. I mean it. Nathan’s an expert on discretion. He even has the word printed on his business card.”

  She doesn’t like this, looking at me through mean little slits. “Even you have to understand,” she says. “My marriage with Nick was over six months before he was shot.” Now that she’s angry, she doesn’t seem to have any difficulty saying the word. “He retained bragging rights, that was all. And he used them with his friends constantly. You should know. You were one of them,” she says.

  “Hey. He never kissed and told with me.”

  “All the same, it was an empty marriage. He knew it and I knew it.”

  “Then why didn’t you divorce him? Or did you find an easier way of dealing with the problem?”

  “You can’t seriously believe that I killed him or that I had anything to do with it?” Now that she wants something, my feckless acceptance of her denial, Dana’s eyes go all soft again and teary. She is able to turn this on faster than most kids can shoot a squirt gun.

  “No. It’s not your style,” I tell her.

  She smiles. There is palpable relief as the hard set of her chin goes smooth and round again.

  “You’d probably use poison or a knife,” I tell her. “But I can’t be sure about Nathan. After all, he is fond of fast cars, and whoever shot Nick left a lot of rubber on the street.”

  “We had nothing to do with it,” she says. “You have to believe me.”

  “So now it’s we? You can vouch for Nathan?”

  “He didn’t do it. He couldn’t do something like that.”

  “You shouldn’t sell yourself short,” I tell her. “Underestimating your attraction to men like that. It doesn’t become you.”

  She should be angry, but instead another instinct takes hold. Looking up at me, she moistens her lips with her tongue.

  “You don’t believe me. What can I do to make you believe me?” she says. She’s going all soft and feminine now, getting dangerous, trying to find her poison gland.

  “It’s probably not you,” I tell her. “It’s just the cynic in me. I sometimes have trouble accepting that the earth is round too. But I get over it. Still, let’s get back to my initial question. If you didn’t love Nick, why didn’t you divorce him?”

  “I don’t know. I probably would have if I’d found the right man,” she says.

  “So Nathan wasn’t the right man, is that it?”

  “Oh, I like Nathan,” she says. What she means is until someone better comes along. “I mean . . . he’s very serious. I really don’t want to hurt him. I don’t want him to know about the checks.”

  “Yes. I can imagine how that might cause him to have some second thoughts on the relationship. I suppose he’d at least want to lock up his checkbook and credit cards in the vault at night.”

  “Neither of us had anything to do with Nick’s death. You have to understand I was desperate,” she says. “Nick left me three months behind on the house mortgage. I don’t know where all the money was going. All I know is I wasn’t seeing any of it. The bank was threatening to take the car away. He wasn’t coming home half the time at night. We were hardly talking. I think he knew about Nathan. But he didn’t seem to care. Something else was going on,” she says. “Maybe he had somebody else. I don’t know.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything about it?”

  She shakes her head.

  I slide off the edge of the desk onto my feet and walk around to the other side, settle into my chair, and scratch my chin, thinking. I sit there for a long time, maybe a minute, saying nothing, just looking at the wall under the row of licenses.

  To Dana this must seem like a year, just sitting there sweating.

  “What are you going to do about the checks?” She finally breaks the silence.

  “Well.” I take a deep sigh. “It looks like you’re going to come up a little short on your end of the settlement,” I tell her.
/>   “Yes. I know. Fifty-seven thousand dollars,” she says.

  “No. It’s going to be a little more than that.” I walk her through the settlement terms, the fact that Margaret is getting two million on the deal or she’s going to walk. In which case the entire settlement goes away, and Dana has an ugly conversation with the D.A. over some bad checks and probably much more.

  I break the news to her that Harry and I won’t be compromising our fees for representing her in the settlement. This will be a full third of whatever she gets, including the fifty-seven thousand she has to pay back to Tolt’s firm.

  Through all of this, she sits listening. She doesn’t argue. Just your average block of ice as she calculates what is left to take home after being ravaged by lawyers. She doesn’t like it, but Dana doesn’t have a lot of choices.

  “Is that it?” she says.

  “Assuming Tolt hasn’t changed his mind and the State Bar hasn’t descended on his office.”

  She snatches her purse and the little tennis hat from the floor in front of her, gets up out of the chair, and turns to leave. Her little white fanny sashaying away.

  “There is one more thing,” I say.

  “What?” She turns, standing halfway between my desk and the door. To Dana, she’s now paid the price for the luxury of a derisive look, her expression filled with scorn as she eyes me, one hand on her hip above her golden thighs.

  “Do you know who Grace Gimble is?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  “Grace Gimble?”

  “One of Nick’s lovers, I suppose?”

  “You tell me,” I say.

  “I’ve never heard of her.”

  “What about Jamaile Enterprises?”

  She shakes her head, dismissive now. “You asked me about that once before,” she says. “I told you I never heard of it. Can I leave now?”

  “Just one more question, in case the cops ask me. What did you tell them about Nathan? Did they ask you about him?”

  “No. Not by name,” she says. “They just asked the general questions. How was my marriage to Nick? Were we happy? What was I supposed to tell them?”

  “You might have tried the truth.”

  “Oh yeah. My husband and I were barely talking. He wasn’t supporting me. I was seeing someone else. I don’t know who he was seeing because he wasn’t coming home nights. Oh, and by the way, he was worth more to me dead than he was alive. Great legal advice,” she says.