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.
She has a point.
