“You mean Lisa Cruz, Jean Scholl, and Riesner. You want alibis for the night the Bronco was stolen?”
“We’ve been stamping out wildfires all over,” Nina said. “But overall is this burning smell from the big question we haven’t had time to address.”
“I’ll hang on to the hose until I keel over.”
Nina heard the fatigue in his voice. “I’m sorry to ask so much,” she said. “But nobody ever said I was easy, even back in the days when I was.”
He laughed and she hung up, opening the door from the hall to to the outer office. No clients awaited.
Sandy, bent way over in her chair, filing, sat up when she heard the door. “Good,” she said. “Mountain of messages on your desk.”
“Anything important?”
“Well, Jack called twice. He said call him back.”
Nina closeted herself and answered the other messages. She wrote out two Vang checks while Sandy got ready to go. At just after five, Sandy appeared at the door, saying, “So long.”
“Have a good night, Sandy.”
“Don’t be takin’ any files home, now.”
After Sandy left, Nina picked up the phone message from Jack, put it down and started to get up and leave, sat down, and picked it up again. She wasn’t sure she liked Jack’s sudden devotion. He called her almost every day now with thoughts, advice, and reprovals. She had latched on to him in the first moments of panic, and she was grateful that he had been available and willing to help, but…
Putting her feet up on the desk, she thought about the three cases. The Vangs were under control. Brandy and Angel were safe and Stinson had been caught, although Paul still needed to find out where Bruce Ford had gone. That left Kevin Cruz, the desperate cop she couldn’t represent anymore. She had cleaned up the harm as well as she could. She could do nothing more for him.
She flashed to the moment when he had grabbed her, to her disgust at his touch and the nascent fear she now felt. What he had done was an incomplete gesture, so fraught, like an obscene promise that must be kept. Why had Kevin gone so far? He didn’t need her comfort as much as he needed her skills as a lawyer. He knew that. Then why? She searched but could not find a reason why. She didn’t feel able to tell anyone about Kevin. Paul would overreact. Kevin was her client and she couldn’t turn on him for one very bad move, go to the police or something. He was already in so much trouble.
She hugged herself, remembering. He could have hurt me, she thought. Then she topped that thought: It’s not over with Kevin.
She called Jack. Predictably, he was still at his office. She imagined him on a high floor of the Transamerica Pyramid, at a wide mahogany desk, an Italian lamp’s hot halogen rays broiling his Harvard blotter.
“I’m just checking in,” Jack said. “What happened with Taylor and Vang?” The depth of his interest extended beyond his casual words. “Did Paul find everyone?”
“Vang is under control,” she told him, and explained, then went on to tell him what had happened at the women’s shelter with Cody Stinson.
“Paul could have handled that better,” Jack said. “Should have held on to the guy at the Hilltop and called the cops.”
She knew Paul wasn’t happy with the way things had gotten away from him either. “So easy to second-guess people, isn’t it?” she said.
He laughed. “No need to defend him, honbun. He’s capable of a mean left hook if I get too rough with him.”
She couldn’t believe he had resurrected the hated nickname of their married days. Through her teeth, she said, “As for the Cruz file, Paul plans to interview Ali Peck tomorrow to try to find out how the secret came out. Kevin’s asked her but I need Paul to cover that ground again.”
Jack asked more concise questions and Nina responded concisely.
“You still have no idea who took the files?” he said.
“For purposes of discussion, we’ve narrowed it down to three potentials, Jeffrey Riesner, Jean Scholl, and Lisa Cruz, but you know, Jack, I have stepped on many toes up here. It could be someone I can’t imagine.”
“Are you putting Paul to work on it?”
“I think-I hope the damage is already done when it comes to those files. But I would like to know. So, yes, within limits.”
“The police aren’t moving on it?”
“They figure getting the Bronco back is all they can do,” Nina said. “The files have no tangible value and I couldn’t explain why I was so worried.” She told him some more about Officer Jean Scholl and their problematic relationship, but fended off Jack’s offer to get emphatic with the local police.
“You sure you have enough help? I mean Paul is good, no question, but Wish, he’s not a trained investigator-”
“He doesn’t work independently. Paul supervises. And Wish is a friend.”
“Loyal, honest, idealistic,” Jack said. “When will you grow up and get with the dead dust of this cynical, postapocalyptic world, girl?”
“The day I get cynical is the day I know I’m done. No offense.”
“None taken. I think it’s essential to be a cynical bastard in this profession, but that’s just me. No, actually, I want to say this. I’ve always been so impressed by you as an attorney, Nina.”
“But not as a human being?” she asked, unable to resist the provocation.
“Well,” he said, “now that you mention it, there was that kid plumber. That definitely colors my perception of you. You half-dressed on the couch, legs spread. Him on top.”
So he had materialized at last, the bugaboo plumber of Bernal Heights, the invisible man that stood motionless between them, undiscussed and misunderstood. “You know, Jack, we should have had this conversation a long time ago. I can’t believe you still hold that guy against me. We were kissing. My legs were not spread. We never even-”
“You only stopped because I showed up and scared him off. That stupid earring he wore. You ten years older than him.”
The disgust in his voice drove away all her pretense of composure. Her voice rose. “So? What about the fact that you were sleeping with another woman at the time? Huh? I mean, talk about lonely. I was in hell, and I never knew why. I couldn’t think what I’d done wrong, except maybe work too hard.”
“People ought to restrain themselves, under the circumstances. Maybe you could have talked to me. We were still new together, only two years into it. Maybe our marriage was salvageable at that point, if you hadn’t-”
“You cheated. You lied. You blamed me for everything that went wrong-”
“Nina,” he said softly, “did you ever love me? Did you ever really love me?”
The question brought her up short. She couldn’t think of an answer. She had married Jack for a million reasons: his sense of humor, his passion for his work, his devotion to her and Bob. They had such fun fantasizing a life together in San Francisco.
Bob needed a father.
She needed someone.
“Yes, I loved you. But you made me so lonely.”
“I was lonely, too,” he said. “What a shame neither one of us had the guts to deal with the problem without all that drama.”
Emotion swept over her. “Worse than that. It was melodrama.”
“We both screwed up,” he said.
Admitting her role in the breakup was hard. The time had come to make peace. Maybe she knew from the first time she set eyes on Jack again they would arrive at this moment, the chance to nail down the coffin lid on their marriage. “Yes,” she said finally, “we both screwed up.”
“I regretted it right away, you know. I married her, and I knew it was a mistake from day one. I wish you and I had tried harder.”
Did she regret the end of her two years of marriage to Jack? The answer came quickly. Not anymore. If she had stayed with Jack, she would never have married a man she had loved with all her heart. After his death, she would never have found her way back to Paul.
“While we were drinking margaritas at Big Sur,” Jack continued, “I had a fantasy that you and I might fall into each other’s arms again.”
“Then you saw me and thought again,” she teased, ready to lighten up.
“I saw you and I saw him. I saw the whole damn thing.”
“Jack, I’m sorry about the way it ended.”
“Me, too, Nina-Pinta. Me, too.”
Papers shuffled over the phone on his end as she closed her eyes and sighed deeply.
“So,” he said, in one of those rapid turnarounds that made him so successful in his work, “moving on.”
“Oh, sure. Of course. We have work to do.”
“What were we talking about?” he asked thoughtfully. “Oh, yes. Your abilities as an attorney. To go on, I’m sorry you’re running into the usual snags, and I know you won’t let it get you down. ’Cause you’re one of the good ones, Nina. Destined to debate. Well-intentioned. The old-fashioned, go-for-real-justice kind of person our profession needs. Unlike me.”
Not quite as fast to recover from their earlier exchange, she said shakily, “Oh, you’re not so bad.”
“I am. I am proud to be bad. Luck or talent, I don’t care what helps me win, as long as I do. And I’m not afraid to get dirty just for the sake of winning. It’s detestable, but it’s me.”
Suddenly the compliment looked less complimentary, as if Nina had a weak, feminine side that prevented her from dirtying her skirts.
“That’s why people are smart enough to hire me and I’m up to my neck in lucrative trouble,” Jack went on arrogantly. “P.S., did you know Paul considered law as a profession?”
“What? No.”
“Yes, indeed. We took the LSAT at the same time, but he blew it. Hates tests, our Paul. Won’t be judged by people he doesn’t admire, and those he admires are few and far between. So, keep that in mind when he begs you to join him in Carmel to live a life of leisure as his concubine. He flirted with the law and it slapped him down. Don’t let him sabotage you. You’re too good to fritter yourself away like that.”
“You are so out of line.”
“I love the guy. He’s my best friend. He has many fine qualities. His relationship with the world isn’t one of them. He’s brilliant sometimes at his job, but partly that’s because he never follows any rules but his own. He made a lousy cop because of it, and I don’t trust him as a P.I. because of it.”
“Shut up, Jack. I don’t want to hear this.”
“Be wary and be smart if you insist on hanging with him. That’s all.”
“Do me a favor. Stick with the legal advice. I don’t need you for personal advice.”
“Okay. All right. Live with him and be his love, but call me if things don’t work out, deal?”
“Enough!”
“Sure. Back to business. All right? Put all that aside for now?”
“Back to business.”
“Give the Vangs their money. Potential exposure is that Mr. Vang will be so pissed off that his wife got half that he’ll file a complaint with the bar that you withheld the money by a couple of days. He won’t look good and you will. I say you have no problem there.”
