The Big Law

They laughed at the same time, which they took as a good omen.

“I won. Get your coat. We’re going out to eat tonight. I’m buying,” said Tom.

Danny.

Going down for the third time, Tom had felt someone firmly take his hand. Ida. Quietly, they dated. Ida suggested that he try writing fiction to diffuse his funk about being transferred down to the burbs. Writing a novel was every reporter’s daydream, so he dusted his off and put a few more hours into two chapters about a private eye who had been a reporter. He gave his PI the name Danny Storey. Ida liked the character’s name but critiqued his story line as improbable and convo-luted. After a few discussions the two rough chapters disappeared into the desk drawer in her study in the four-season porch off the living room and were forgotten.

Except in her bedroom in the dark.

Calling him Danny was her foreplay spoof in bed. For all her powers of observation, she had no idea how deeply the name goaded him or how severely he had come to hate the boundaries of his life. How he resented needing her to keep his job.

Later, after dinner, after they returned to her house, she undressed in the ritual darkness. It was also in this darkness she moved her damn pistol around, like a pea under a shell-from her purse to the bed table drawer, sometimes even under her pillow. He waited and thought: she was the face of realism. Hold on to realism and it will save you from desperation. You will make do.

After you were with Ida awhile you lost your bearings.

Was she extremely beautiful or disfigured? Certainly she was old-fashioned, a Freudian machination straight from a Hitchcock film. Stylishly repressed, precise; the best-dressed woman in the office.

But in the dark…

Like a guerrilla army, she owned the night. Her queen-size bed rustled with satin sheets, the air was moist and humidified, there were lotions, knowing fingers. She’d evoked in Tom something his pallid ex-wife of twelve years could never comprehend. Something called good sex.

Then Tom and Ida had joined hands and skipped over the slim, but unforgettable, margin that separated good sex from great sex.

“Can’t we leave the light on?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I want to see you do things. In the dresser mirror.”

“No lights,” said Ida.

“Never?”

“Not tonight. Sometime, maybe.”

“When?”

“When you tell me what you’ve got going.”

“No. Oh.” Yes. Some light, faint slivers, eked through cracks in doors, glowworms of moonlight noodled between the drapes and windowsills. Just enough to make her out, subtle and expert. Silky smooth white muscle, rising. Tongue out. Red Joker’s grin.

“C’mon, tell me what you’re on to…” she whispered.

They practiced together, keeping up their skills. Grouping the thrills in tidy clusters. Better together in practice than they would be in real life because they were not each other’s first choice.

They took turns pleasing each other. When her turn came round, she sighed:

“Yes, Danny, yes.”

He held on. Shut his eyes. Pretended. She was Caren Angland and he could hit the jackpot and win the Pulitzer and he was someone else-the Danny of their closet rapture.

His orgasm flamed in deep space. Elated and sad and lonely, he held realism in his arms, and in a moment of pure hell, he knew this was as good as it was ever going to get.

10

At 4 A.M. Phil Broker and his daughter slept on the Lake Superior shore, twenty-two miles south of the Ontario border.

Two hundred seventy miles to the south, in Highland Park, Tom James snored in the soothing bondage of Ida’s satin sheets. Twenty miles to the east of Ida’s bed, the black water of the St. Croix River slid between rippled sheets of ice, below the Angland house. On the second floor, behind her locked door, Caren lay on top of a down quilt, rigid as a crusader chiseled on a medieval tomb.

She wove tiny threads of hope in the dark. At the last possible moment Keith would catch himself and pull back from the edge.

The phone rang. Keith’s bed squeaked in the separate bedroom down the hall. He lurched awake. Thump, his feet struck the polished floor.

Slippers slapped down the hallway past her doorway and descended the stairs. Sounds. Light switches. More footsteps.

Ten minutes later, headlights swung through her windows.

Tangled shadows from the oaks spooled across the wall above her headboard. The lights switched off. The antique door knocker on the front door rapped three times.

Downstairs, the door opened. A brief muffled conver sation carried up the stairwell. Women circle and embroider their communication. The two male voices dumped their load of subjects and verbs like bags of sand. The door slammed.

In the crash of the shutting door Caren felt the jolt of his anger gather primal force. He was cold gravel and ice, a fast-moving glacier who took the stairs two at a time. The knob on her latched door rattled. When she didn’t respond, he hit the door with his heavy shoulder.

The door splintered on its hinges. “God, you make me sick,” he hissed as he pushed through the broken door. His breath smelled meaty with whiskey and rage. He wore his old Minnesota Gophers warm-up, with untied Nikes on his feet. Shoelace tips whipped the floor.

He pulled her off the bed, pushed her down the stairs into the kitchen and shoved her in a chair.

He was madder than she’d ever seen him. Her fear was emotional, psychological, moral. She still clung to the one truism that summed him up: He was the ice man, capable of anything except losing physical control.

Keith ran a hand through his thick yellow hair, a vain gesture she had once thought attractive. Now she shuddered when he pointed to a black and white photograph that lay on the kitchen table. Her. Hands out, steadying Tom James in the Christmas tree lot. The photographer had caught the moment so it almost looked intimate. She was impressed how fast they’d had the film developed.

“So now you’re having me followed,” she said.

“Not me. Them.” The words dropped from his lips. Clink-clink-clink, like three stacked coins.

The kitchen closed in around them, a silent aviary of tile, stainless steel and polished wood where unanswered questions came to roost.

Even now, if only he’d drop his damned arrogant front, she’d reach out to him. Try to understand. But he was too brilliant. And now he’d been seduced by the dark 48 / CHUCK LOGAN

ness of his own big dumb shadow. Destiny was too kind, but not too strong, a word for him.

“I have to know. Did you change or were you always like this?” she asked.

“What? What?” Not even language, just an angry grunt.

His eyes tracked around the kitchen and everywhere they touched she could imagine the red rampage of a laser, which, like Keith himself, was precise and destructive.

She raised her hand to shade her eyes against a glare, but the cold December dawn gave no light. The room was barely lit by a fluorescent bar over the stainless steel range. The hollow glare was in her head.

The slight movement tripped a hair trigger in him. His left hand whipped out-his hard cop’s hand with his shoulder behind it like a leg of beef-and the heel of his open hand caught her alongside the right cheekbone and