Faithful Unto Death

by Stephanie Jaye Evans

“Jenasy!” Cruz’s voice cracked like a whip.

  Nat shook his head before Cruz could take it further. “Honey, why don’t you leave the service to me? We don’t have eulogies at a Catholic funeral, that’s usually saved for the wake, and the Catholic Church is pretty strict about the songs we allow, too.”

  “I told her, but she won’t listen,” Cruz said.

  Honey rummaged in her purse. “I brought this CD that Graham really—”

  Again Nat shook his head; he put a hand over Honey’s. “No, Honey, no recorded music, no secular music, and no Kipling. It doesn’t matter how special it was to Graham. I promise you the service will be exactly what Graham would be comfortable with. You save those other things for when your friends and family gather together for the visitation.” He gave Honey’s hands a final pat.

  “I told her,” Cruz said.

  “Got to go,” said Nat. “Jenasy, walk me to the car, will you?”

  Jenasy stood obediently and followed Nat out the door.

  Honey gave me a sad smile. She said, “Looks like I won’t need your help planning the service, Bear, and I guess I can choose a casket by myself. I’m sorry to have taken your time. You go on. I’ll be fine.”

  Cruz sat down next to Honey and nodded up at me.

  “I’ll see to things,” Cruz said.

  You know what Wanderley said about brown-skinned people taking care of the poor white people? Okay, forget all the brown skin–white skin part of it. I’m telling you I really believe God is using Cruz to minister to the Garcias. Jenasy obviously minds Cruz in a way she doesn’t mind her mother, Cruz is keeping an eye on Honey’s drinking, and I didn’t miss the fact that when Alex got home on Monday, it was Cruz he spoke to, not his mom. That speaks of relationship, doesn’t it? So, sure, Cruz gets paid to do her job. I get paid to do mine; I’m still a minister. And so is Cruz.

  I left the building confident that Honey was in good hands.

  I walked through the door and saw Jenasy and Nat in the parking lot, deep in conversation. Jenasy was talking fast with her mouth and her hands and Nat leaned against his white Taurus, arms folded across his chest, his mouth frowning. He looked up and gestured me over. Jenasy glanced back and, I think, protested at my being brought into the conversation, but Nat waved me over again.

  “Jenasy, your dad talked to Bear last Friday; maybe he told Bear about this. Tell Bear what you started to tell me,” he said.

  Jenasy stepped in front of Nat, effectively cutting me out of the circle, and said, “Maybe he didn’t.”

  “You tell Bear anyway. I want his take on this, and he’s not going to go blabbing it all over Sugar Land. I know Bear.”

  Jenasy stood hands on hips, staring at Nat.

  “Jenasy.” Nat’s voice was soft but confident in his authority, and a little impatient.

  Jenasy threw her hands up in exasperation and then dropped them. She stared back at Nat, held the stare, then dropped her gaze. Her hands went to her hair. She pulled the elastic band out, let her hair fall, and then gathered it together again and twisted it up in the band. It’s a delaying tactic I’ve seen my girls use. She tilted her head back and squinted at the pale blue sky, blew a breath out.

  “All right, then. You know I’m pre-law?”

  I’d heard something about it. Mainly it meant you could do your undergrad work in anything at all. If you had good grades, and did well on the LSAT, you could get into law school with nearly any degree—linguistics, art history, whatever.

  “Last summer I clerked for Dad. Not a real clerkship; you have to be in law school for that. Mainly I filed papers, delivered papers, and typed papers. I got to do some research. Dad wanted me to see what it would be like to work in a law office before I made my mind up about law school, right?

  “I’ve already made up my mind. You know anything else that can earn you more than a hundred and sixty thousand straight out of grad school? Tell you what, a master’s in social work isn’t going to bring that in.”

  No, it wasn’t. But I’m really glad there are people who master in social work, because there are too many lawyers and not enough social workers. I couldn’t see it in her looks, but HD’s genes were coming through on this grandchild at least.

  “I thought I’d get to see a ton of Dad, but he didn’t spend much time in the office, and when he did, he was usually with clients. Still, we’d have lunch together at least once a week. He’d answer my questions. He’d tell me things.

  “There was this one guy, a partner. He was real friendly with me, always stopping by my cubicle, asking how things were, did I need any help, which I didn’t, and did I want to come with him to such and such a meeting, he could introduce me to this client or that judge, which I didn’t want to do, either. You know, real helpful. Toooooo helpful.”

  Jenasy gave Nat a look, then turned and focused her gaze on me to make sure we’d gotten her point, which we had since we’re neither of us morons.

  “None of the other partners were anywhere near that attentive—not the associates, either, and they were a lot closer to my age. I thought he was maybe hitting on me, right? And then I thought maybe he wasn’t, because I wasn’t getting any vibe or anything. I mean, he was uber-tense and everything? But it wasn’t like sexual tension. You know what I mean?”

  Jenasy shot an uncomfortable look at Nat, but he nodded and put a big hand on her shoulder.

  She went on, reassured, “It was confusing. So I told Dad about it at lunch.”

  She stopped and pulled her hair out of the band again and shook her hair out, then held the navy band in her hands, stretching it and twining it between her fingers as she went on. Cat’s Cradle.

  “Dad gets all grim and quiet and I’m thinking that maybe I pissed him off or something, I don’t know, telling tales and all. He’s like that for a while, and I’m completely wishing I hadn’t brought it up, and then Dad shakes his head and says no, he doesn’t think the guy is hitting on me.”

  She took a shaky breath. “And then Dad told me to never tell another living soul what he was about to tell me, right?”

  There was a long pause, and then in a rush Jenasy said, “So you know what? I’m not going to. I’m sorry, Father Nat, but this was a bad idea. I promised Dad.”

  She took a couple of steps backward, away from us. Nat shot out his hand and took Jenasy’s elbow and pulled her gently back.

  He said, “Sweetheart, let’s hold on there a minute. What your dad told you, do you think—and you are a smart girl, Jenasy, so I’m going to accept your judgment on this—do you think that what your dad told you might conceivably be a motive for murder? Could somebody want your daddy dead over whatever this is?”

  Now the tears came.

  “I don’t know, do I, Father? I don’t know! All I know is that I promised Dad, and … and that’s all I know!”

  “Uh-huh. I understand.”

  Nat pulled Jenasy in close and hugged her. I wanted to shake her. She could have information that would get her own brother out of the police scrutiny, didn’t she see that? I stayed quiet and rocked back and forth on my feet. The hug would probably work better than a shake would anyway.

  “Here’s what I think, Jenasy. Your dad, he would be so proud of you …”

  Fresh tears at that.

  “You are trying to honor your dad by keeping his secret. And that’s good. The thing is, Jenasy, when your dad asked you to promise, he was never thinking he could end up dead over this problem, am I right?”

  Jenasy nodded her head against Nat’s shirt and left a smear of mascara. She held him tight around the waist.

  “What I think is, if there is even the slightest chance that the information you have might lead the police to the person who killed your dad, I think you have to tell. Your dad will understand, Jenasy, and I am giving you permission to break your promise. Sometimes promises have to be broken.”

  I filed that away to think about later.

  “You understand, Jenasy?”

  A long
shuddery breath, and Jenasy nodded. So Nat had made the right call between the hug and the shake.

  Jenasy wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and once again gathered up her tumble of hair and twisted it into the elastic band. It beat smoking for keeping your hands busy.

  “Right. Well, Dad, he starts talking so low I had to lean across the table to hear him and he says, ‘You know what perjury is, Jenasy?’ Which is a total duh, yeah, I know what perjury is. Dad says, ‘If your witness perjures himself, and you know about it, you must withdraw from the case. You can’t say why you’re withdrawing. You file a Motion to Withdraw with the court.’ I said, ‘Wouldn’t everyone know your witness lied? I mean, why else would you quit in the middle of a trial?’ But Dad says that there are lots of legitimate reasons to withdraw, and anyway, it’s the law. You have to withdraw, and if you don’t, and the info gets out, you get disbarred. You can’t ever practice law again. Which means you’re going to be deadbeat poor, right? But it’s worse than that.”

  Jenasy said “worse than that” as if the idea of anything being worse than “deadbeat” poor was mind-boggling.

  “If the court’s decision is affected by that lie, then the whole partnership could get sued. Dad’s law firm is old-school—they’re a pure partnership. That’s like all for one and one for all—if one is screwed, they’re all screwed. This man? The one who was paying me too much attention? He did that.”

  “He perjured himself?” I asked. I was getting lost.

  Jenasy gave me an impatient look.

  “His client perjured himself. The lawyer knew it and he didn’t withdraw. When it was all over, the guy who lied won a multimillion-dollar settlement.”

  Nat and I came out with our questions at the same time.

  “How did your dad know about this?”

  “But if your dad knew about this, isn’t he in the same boat as the first lawyer?”

  “Just a sec,” Jenasy said. “Give me a minute. The client, he came to Dad first; he wanted Dad to be his lawyer. And Dad talked to him, took some notes, and recorded the meeting, which is good CYA.”

  I said, “CYA?”

  Nat said, “Cover Your Ass. We’re having to do it all the time down at the Catholic Church now.” He gave a weary sigh.

  “So, somewhere in the meeting, Dad discovers that he has a conflict of interest with this case. You know what a conflict of interest is?”

  We both nodded yes, but of course, Jenasy explained it to us anyway.

  “That means, maybe one of the involved parties is another client of yours, right? Or maybe you’ve invested money in one of the involved parties’ business or something, right?”

  We both said yes, we truly did understand what a conflict of interest was.

  “But that doesn’t mean someone else in the firm can’t handle the case. Dad passed the case, with copies of his notes and recordings, on to the creep who kept hanging around me.”

  “What’s his name?” I asked.

  She ignored me and continued, “After the case, everyone at the firm is all happy because it was a contingency case, and the firm was going to get a huge payoff. You know what a contingency case is?”

  I said, “Oh, my gosh, Jenasy, yes, we know what a contingency case is. Old people watch TV, too.”

  Jenasy looked miffed but kept on talking. “A contingency case means you only get paid if the client wins the case, and if he wins, you get a percentage of the judgment. Because the lawyer is taking on the risk of not getting paid for his time, that percentage has to be good or there isn’t any incentive to take the case, right? Lawyers have retired off what they got from one contingency case. It can happen.”

  Yeah, Miss Jenasy was going to be a fine lawyer. Already thought she was getting paid by the word.

  “So everyone was all, ‘Wooo, wooo!’ Right? Champagne popping, backslapping—the works. The lawyer telling his big triumph story, everybody all, ‘You the man!’ and Dad hears something that makes him think. Once he’s in his office, he gets the transcript to the case, and reads it, then he gets out his original notes, and he reads those, and then he knows.”

  I needed to go. This was the loooongest story.

  “This lawyer’s client perjured himself. The lawyer had to know—he had Dad’s notes and all, no way would he have left them unread.”

  Got it. Got it.

  “Dad goes to this guy’s office—”

  “What’s his name?” I asked again.

  Again she ignored me. “Dad wants to think there’s an honest mistake, because normally, Dad wouldn’t rat out a fellow partner. I mean, he’d never do something like this himself, but you don’t take down a partner without some pretty serious thought about it. Dad spells it out to the guy and the lawyer, a total dumb ass, he leans back in his chair and says that those are pretty serious allegations, and that in the first place, any little discrepancy wouldn’t have made any difference to the outcome of the case, and secondly, he unfortunately can’t prove to Dad how untrue the allegations are, because he doesn’t happen to have those notes and recordings anymore. They were in his briefcase, the one he left in a cab in New York. And he smiles at Dad.

  “Dad tells the man that, of course, he had passed on copies; he would never have passed on the originals. And then Dad walked out of the office.”

  “Is that all?” I asked. “End of story?”

  Jenasy turned so that she was facing Nat directly, kind of edging me out.

  “Dad goes to Bradford Williams,” she says, looking only at Nat. “He’s the managing partner, and Dad tells Williams what he knows. Dad said Williams was seriously pissed. Pissed that one of their lawyers would have pulled such a trick in a court of law, but Dad said it was pretty clear that Williams was even more upset that Dad had brought it to his attention. Williams didn’t come right out and say it or anything, but the feeling Dad got was that Williams thought Dad should have just kept his mouth shut and forgotten about it. That Dad had dumped it all on Williams’s shoulders and Williams was not happy.”

  “And?” I said.

  “So Williams said there would have to be a confidential meeting with all the partners there, and that’s like, halfway impossible because everybody is traveling and there’s never a time when all the partners are in the office, and each time Dad asked Williams about it, Williams got snottier and snottier.

  “Dad told me he thought he was going to have to report it himself. And that would mean he would have to leave the law firm, because he would not be the most popular partner on the seventeenth floor, right? Everyone was going to be hurt bad. It could even bring the law firm down, but if Dad couldn’t get the firm to take action, he didn’t know what else to do. He said he was not going to be a party to a lie; his father hadn’t raised him that way, and it counted less than nothing that this sleaze lawyer was sucking up to me.”

  Now Jenasy’s eyes teared up and she tilted her head back to keep the tears from spilling out.

  “You know what I’m wondering, right? I’m wondering did this perjury guy decide to make sure Dad never reported it?”

  Or that Bradford Williams guy, or another partner who got wind of the story and didn’t want to see a twenty-year investment turned to ashes for a mistake someone else had made, and for someone else’s conscience. Seemed to me the circle of suspects had just increased by however many partners Graham had.

  And who had gone to the Garcias’ the very day Graham was killed and tried to collect Graham’s laptop and papers?

  Twenty

  How could you fit together all the pieces of Graham Garcia’s personality? Baby Bear and I had a short run on the levee, then took a break right about where Alex told me he’d seen his dad the night Graham had been killed.

  Graham Garcia had not been a simple man, whether or not he was, as his son suspected, a Humbert Humbert. But not with Jo. With some other young girl with long dark hair. Who was Jo’s size.

  My own meeting with Graham had left me puzzled. Graham came off as a distan
t, hard man, determined to end his marriage on his own terms. He hadn’t once mentioned his children by name, or the effect a divorce might have on them. There were no questions as to how to do as little damage as possible to the wife he would be leaving behind. On the other hand, he hadn’t tried to justify himself, or explain why Honey was the real reason the marriage had failed. He hadn’t told me it was all her fault.

  Garcia had said his adopted son would not have wanted to shame his father. From Dr. Garcia’s description, he had been driven even as a child, a boy who had to become a man way too soon. A twelve-year-old rescuing his mother.

  When I was that age, my greatest worry was whether or not I’d get to play first string for my junior high football team. Graham, once he escaped his terrible home, had worked like a demon to fit into a world he hadn’t been prepared for. And he had succeeded. He’d fit in beautifully. He’d made serious money. He’d married the beautiful daughter of a rich man. He’d had two beautiful children.

  Father Nat told me that Graham had been a deeply committed Christian, a regular at the seven-thirty mass Sunday mornings and a generous giver. Once Jenasy had left, I’d asked if Graham had ever said anything about an affair—Nat had replied, “You know we Catholics hold ourselves to a higher standard; the confessional really is sacred, Bear.” Then he’d given me a slap on the back that I felt clean through to my sternum.

  I felt sure that if Graham had confessed to the affair, he hadn’t mentioned that it had been with a young teenager—no way Nat would’ve been so blithe.

  The story Jenasy recounted showed her father as a man who would accept great personal sacrifice rather than compromise his integrity. But somehow, sleeping with a teenager wasn’t a challenge to that integrity?

  In spite of what Dr. Garcia said, I didn’t see him as the reason why Graham didn’t initiate divorce proceedings himself. Graham’s stepbrother had divorced and there had been no rift in the father-son relationship. Sooooo …

  I couldn’t make it work. I don’t know what a pedophile looks like, but still, Garcia didn’t look like one. And wouldn’t a pedophile want to hang on to a background like Graham’s? Wouldn’t his family offer the perfect cover? What would he have to gain from a divorce? I mean, it’s not as though he could marry a child. There’s no way such an affair, if it can even be called an affair, could be anything more than a dalliance.