She said, “Is everything all right?”
I said, “Yeah,” and filled her in about recent events.
“That sounds good,” Koosje said when I had finished. “Why do you look like you just swallowed a lemon?”
“Because I don’t like it when things just hang, as they are now. Because I like conclusions, resolutions.” I looked at her. “Because I slept with Carolyn Longo last night.”
Koosje nodded, her eyes on mine. “Why are you telling me?”
“Because you have a right to know. I know there’s a school of thought that holds that the errant partner should never ever tell the injured party, but I’m not sure I buy into that.”
“Mm. I have counseled married clients to do just that—not tell their spouses about an affair. It only hurts the spouse. It doesn’t undo the injury.” She sighed. “But they usually tell all anyway. They’re looking for forgiveness. They want to be told it’s all right. Or they want to be told it’s not all right and get thrown out of the house. Either way, the burden is off of them, off of their consciences.” Her eyes wandered the room and returned to my face. “Is that what you want, Nebraska? Forgiveness?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. As I said, I’m a guy who likes resolutions.”
Koosje stood and walked over to the tall windows in the west wall. She looked down at the street below. “We’re not married. We’ve made no promises. I told you before.”
“No explicit promises,” I said. “But I guess I always felt …”
“I did too.” She turned. The light was behind her: I could not see her face. “Now what? I told you how I felt and you told me how you felt, and you went and did what you did, which is your right, and now you’ve come here and you’ve eased your conscience. You’ve put the responsibility on me. I have to decide what happens next. What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either.” Her voice was steady and calm. We might as well have been discussing whether to get a toaster fixed or to scrap it and buy a new one. Partly that was Koosje’s nature. Partly it was her professional training. And partly it was the surroundings. They were designed and decorated to be calming, soothing, nonthreatening. I hadn’t chosen the location with that in mind, but if it helped, so much the better.
“What is there between you and Carolyn?” Koosje asked.
“Twenty-year-old memories. An unfinished love affair.”
Koosje let go a puff of air that might have been a short laugh. “Is that it? An unfinished case that you had to wrap up? Just another search for resolution?”
“Could be. Look, I told you before, I’m not entirely in touch with what’s going on between me and Carolyn. Maybe nothing. I do know that when I rolled out this morning it was you I wanted to see, not her.”
“Because your conscience bothered you.”
“All right. Would it be better if it hadn’t? Would it be better if I didn’t care one way or the other? Maybe I’m here right now because, subconsciously, I want you to tell me it’s okay I went to bed with another woman last night. Maybe, subconsciously, I want you to break off the relationship. Or maybe I’m here because the whole point of a relationship is trying to figure out what makes the other person tick. How can we have a relationship if you don’t have—if I don’t give you—what you need in order to try to understand me better? And vice versa. That’s why Jen and I don’t have a relationship. Neither one of us has the slightest idea where the other one is coming from.
“So, yeah, I could have kept mum about sleeping with Carolyn. I would feel guilty, but you get over that, you learn how to handle that. I could have kept you in the dark and we would go on much as before. But there would be a flaw. And the flaw would be that I had not been honest with you. I would have lied to you about me, about what I am. Why? So you would keep loving me? What you would be loving, though, would be the lie. You might not know it, but I would. And it would have its effect.”
I stood up and walked across the room, stood next to her and looked down at the street, at the diagonally parked cars, at the tourists, and the locals escorting their out-of-town guests. Koosje’s eyes were on me. I could feel them. After a little while I turned and faced them. They were clear and dry and almost dispassionate, almost disinterested.
Almost, but not quite.
“Sooner or later,” I said, “it would have its effect. I thought sooner would be better. Bad enough I’ve hurt you, something I never wanted to do; I won’t compound the sin by lying to you.”
I watched the street awhile. Koosje turned toward the window and did likewise.
“What about you and Carolyn?”
“The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. I don’t know. I guess it depends on you. On whether you think we, you and I, have a future. That’s not to say I’ll turn right around and take up with Carolyn if this is the end for you and me, just that if there is a future for you and me, I want to be in on it.”
Koosje remained mute, watching the street.
“I do know this,” I said. “The other night you asked why I would want to risk losing what we have, you and I. I didn’t answer. Now I have risked it. And having risked it … I keep asking myself the same damn question.”
Koosje said nothing. I said nothing.
And we stood there for some time, watching people who didn’t know they were being watched, saying nothing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In case you haven’t guessed, I let Loverboy lunch in peace. I didn’t leave Koosje’s office until after twelve, just in time to make her late for her noontime group, and by the time I got downtown Jonathon Desotel would already have gone in search of the perfect hamburger with fries. He had never dined at the Olympic Club during the time I was on his tail. Whether that was a commentary on the cuisine or merely indicative of Desotel’s need for a midday change of scenery, I couldn’t say.
Oh, sure, I probably could have tracked him down if I’d really wanted to. I’m a trained detective and everything—plus Desotel was in the habit of hitting the same downtown bars and beaneries with numbing regularity. Or I could have camped in front of the club and awaited his return, just to reassure myself that he was sticking to the routine. But the sad truth is, I didn’t feel like it. I had practiced being his shadow for more than a week; I had gotten quite good at it; and I was bored with it. The nonresolution of the Longo business aggravated me, bothered me, like an itch you can’t reach. I couldn’t let it go. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was more than a little strange that the Longo affair and the Desotel affair overlapped, the point of overlap being Eloise Slater and Jonathon Desotel’s mutual acquaintance.
I swung by the Central Library, found a meter with forty minutes left on it, and went up.
After I don’t know how many years, I still wasn’t used to the “new” library. Libraries are supposed to be old buildings, cramped, hushed, poorly lighted, musty, smelling of book dust and wood floors and the flowery, old-fashioned perfume of the wizened crones behind the circulation desk. They are not supposed to be open, airy, well-lighted spaces filled with glass and gray steel, resonating with activity, loaded with electronic gimcrackery. For cryin’ out loud, they don’t even stamp book cards anymore. They take a picture of it lying next to your library card.
It ain’t natural.
I dug up some local directories, city as well as telephone, and looked up Jonathon Desotel’s—and Eloise Slater’s—backward-named friend. The name had been sort of rattling around in the old brainpan ever since the Slater woman first mentioned it. I didn’t know why. James didn’t look at all familiar to me, and I was certain we had never met. Of course, as I said before, I do get around some and could have come across the name anywhere. Or, hell, maybe I was thinking of the fifth president of these United States.
The city directory gave Monroe James’s occupation as “financial consultant,” which I already knew and which was about as unhelpful a description as could b
e imagined. If I advise you not to put fifty cents in a broken vending machine, does that make me your “financial consultant”?
His home address was listed. No office address.
The white pages gave an office number beneath his residential listing but, again, no address.
James carried only a line listing in the Yellow Pages, no display ad. Again, no street address, just James, Monroe, Fin Cnslt and the Omaha number. I tried comparing the prefix and the number against those of the consulting firms listed, in case he worked out of one of them. No match.
Too bad. I would have liked to visit his office. Whether or not the man was in.
The pay phones were downstairs. I invested money in one and dialed James’s office. “This is Monroe James. I’m not available right now—”
I slammed down the receiver hook, breaking the connection, and shoved a finger into the coin-return slot. I once read in a Lawrence Block novel that if you hang up on an answering machine fast enough, sometimes you get your money back. It’s never worked for me.
They do a pretty fair job of hiding the World-Herald index, but with the help of a librarian—young, well dressed, nice looking, and male: not at all as God intended—I found it. And James, Monroe.
There were perhaps a dozen entries, none of them more recent than three years, most of them ganged up over a four-or five-month span, some of them daily in that time.
omaha lawyer faces charges
new questions in reilly jury-bribe case
local lawyer questioned in jury-tamper case
lawyer censured
lawyer james disbarred
james charges dropped
“Lawyer James Disbarred” sounded promising. I got hold of the proper microfilm spool—plastic newspapers: more blasphemy!—and wheeled to the last page of the local-news section, four years back:
lawyer james disbarred
From staff reports
lincoln—Omaha lawyer Monroe James yesterday was disbarred by the Nebraska Bar Association. James, who has been accused of jury tampering in the recent trial of former Omaha Councilman Rob Reilly, had been censured by the association last April.
A reporter’s calls to James yesterday were not returned.
Katherine Gallagher of the state bar association said disbarring would not affect criminal charges pending against James … .
I didn’t care what Katherine Gallagher said. I skimmed to the bottom of the piece:
James, 39, has long been a controversial figure in trial law. He had been associated with several Omaha law firms, most recently Miller Moore Gianelli and Feeny.
Miller Moore Gianelli and Feeny—no commas, puh-leez—was one of those brash, aggressive, balls-to-the-walls firms that have been springing up everywhere in the last ten or fifteen years. No erudite gentlemen in three-piece pinstripes and pince-nez, these: Miller Moore, et al., were to their bar what brawlers are to mine. Combat lawyers. As near as I could tell, they had never shunned publicity, or notoriety, before. If they dumped James, and reading between the lines said they had—well, that was interesting.
As was the fact that Miller Moore Gianelli and Feeny was the firm that employed Carolyn Longo.
Miller Moore occupied a substantial chunk of a midtown office center. It was all industrial carpet, fabric-covered walls, modern art, lots of glass. An almost clinical sterility. The library was a narrow room, as underfurnished as the reception area had been, and dominated by a chrome-legged long table whose ebony surface was polished to a mirror brilliance. Chrome shelving on two walls supported uncounted tons of legal volumes. Sunlight slipped in through quarter-inch gaps in the blinds over two long windows.
Carolyn was late coming back from lunch. The receptionist was certain she’d be back any minute. I always wonder, when people say things like that, how they know. In any event, I accepted her invitation to wait in the library, declined her offer of coffee. My caffeine-intake rate goes in cycles, and I had been on a definite upturn lately. Time to taper off again. Or risk being drummed out of the Robert Young Fan Club.
I didn’t have a report for Carolyn. The one I had started on in the wee hours rested, unfinished, in my typewriter. It seemed like everything I started lately remained unfinished. Unfinished Business, I thought. That’s what I should title The Next Book. Assuming I ever finish it, of course. But with Carolyn’s report, at least, I had a valid reason: Monroe James. Midway into the report, or less, I realized that James’s acquaintance—or whatever—with Eloise Slater connected him at least tenuously to the Longo investigation. Until I had followed up on that connection, whatever the follow-up might or might not reveal, a report was premature.
“Unfinished business,” I said to the books along the wall.
Carolyn finally showed, flushed and somewhat breathless. Her dark hair was mussed, as if she hadn’t taken the time to stop and brush it after coming in from the great outdoors.
“Sorry,” she said. “You should have let me know you were coming, I’d’ve been sure to be here and—”
“It’s all right. Spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. If this isn’t a good time …”
“No, it’s fine. I’ve just been behind schedule all day, is all. I had a hard time getting out of bed this morning.” She tried a tentative, almost shy smile. “When you were gone this morning, I didn’t …” She paused, closed the library door, and leaned against it. “Were you turned off by … you know …”
Talk like this always makes me uncomfortable, fidgety. No matter what you say, it’s the wrong thing. Or the inflection’s wrong. Or it’s taken wrong. Now you know why I had ducked the morning-after scene that a.m. Only to voluntarily walk into an afternoon-after scene. “Did I act turned off?” When in doubt, answer with a question.
Her smile grew slightly. “Not very.” She smoothed her hair self-consciously. “I don’t know what happened last night, Ivan, I really don’t. I don’t know what came over me. When you told me about Gregg and his … well, his girlfriend and the things they liked to do, I—I don’t know. I can’t explain it, I can’t explain why I wanted you to … tie me up. Or thought I did. I’m not the sort who fantasizes about whips and chains and dungeons—all that Story of O stuff.”
“There’s a considerable difference between a little innocent B and D and having someone’s initials branded on your backside,” I said.
“How … how far do you think Gregg and his friend went?”
“Pretty far, from what I gather. She has all the paraphernalia.”
Carolyn shuddered a little. Maybe it was because the air-conditioning was cranked up too high. She started to speak, lost her voice or her momentum. Again she smoothed her hair and the front of her dress in a nervous, self-conscious way. Her eyes were not on me. “Thanks,” she finally managed.
“For what?”
Another search for the words.
“For not … I was confused last night. Or something. Thanks for not taking advantage of that. Thanks for … Well, just thanks.”
Carolyn’s eyes found mine. There was something in them, something to be read, but it was written in a language I didn’t understand. There was a part of me that wanted to spend a lifetime learning that language.
I cleared my throat, mumbled something inane in response to her thanks, cleared my throat again once or twice, and, finally, said, “I need to ask you about someone. He used to work here. Monroe James.”
Maybe I was just projecting—you pick up neat jargon like that when you hang around with shrinks—but Carolyn seemed almost as eager as I was to have the subject changed. We were good midwesterners, uncomfortable putting our deepest feelings into words and laying them out for others to see. I guess I should speak only for myself. But Carolyn showed no signs of objecting to a new topic. “Him,” she said, rolling her eyes elaborately.
“Then you know him.”
“Knew him. Sort of. I never worked with him directly, thank God.”
“Bad egg?”
“James was a hot dog, a grandstande
r. Everyone here is, more or less—the firm has that reputation, and the attorneys love it and play it up as much as possible—but James was different. He was lazy. Good, but lazy. He used these shyster tactics to cover up the fact that he was too lazy to do his homework. He cut corners, took risks he didn’t have to take. Guys like him spend twice as much energy trying to get out of doing the job right as they’d spend just doing it. You know they kicked him out of here? That’s pretty heavy-duty, especially with someone who’d probably have made partner in another year or two.”
“He was disbarred, too.”
Carolyn nodded. “And escaped prosecution by a hair’s breadth, or so the jungle drums said.”
“What exactly did he do? Something about jury tampering …”
She had been standing. Now she pulled out a chrome-tube chair with pale gray upholstery and sat. I hitched a hip up onto the edge of the conference table. It was like sitting on a block of ice.
“They say he bribed a juror in that Reilly trial a few years ago.” She shrugged. “No one was able to prove anything, so the charges were dropped.”
“And so was James.”
“I don’t think there was any question but that he did it. Proving it was something else again. Of course, the irony is Reilly got sent up anyway.”
My recollection of that case was dim, very dim. Something about misappropriation of city property and services—he had a municipal road crew resurface his driveway, or something equally weighty. I couldn’t remember exactly, still can’t, and don’t care enough to go back and look it up. Events like that are of their time: much in the news today, the topic of every conversation no matter how casual; tomorrow, faded like cut flowers.
“Have you seen Monroe James since he left the firm?”
Carolyn frowned at me. “That’s an odd question.”
My turn to frown. “How so?”
“I told you I hardly knew him.”
“You know an awful lot about him.”
“Office talk—the jungle drums. I barely knew the man.”
“But have you seen him lately? Talked to him?”
Money Trouble Page 16
