“You have a big mouth, Bobby,” Gina said. Then she let out a little gasp and grabbed Victoria's left hand. “Omigod! Look at yours. It's gorgeous.” She practically drooled on Victoria's emerald-cut diamond, propped up on four pedestals, with smaller diamonds running up two side channels. “I love the design. The baguettes are, like, I don't know, a shiny staircase, a pathway to heaven.”
“Why would a man give a woman a ring like that,” Steve asked, “when for a fraction of the money, he could buy a plasma TV?”
“Don't listen to him,” Gina said. “He's the least romantic man I've ever slept with. And I've shagged some real turkeys.”
“But look who's the biggest giblet of them all.” Victoria's smile was as shiny as her diamond.
“Victoria, if you broke up with your fiance, would you give the ring back?” Gina asked.
“I'm definitely going to marry Bruce, so it's a moot question.”
“But what if something happened,” Gina persisted, following them halfway up the stairs. “What if you caught him cheating?”
“I can't imagine Bruce doing anything like that,” Victoria said.
“I can,” Steve said. “In flagrante delicto with a curvaceous avocado.”
“Or what if you got tired of him or found someone else?” Gina said.
“That,” Victoria said, sounding profoundly confident, “would never, ever happen.”
Victoria checked out Steve's waiting room like a detective at a crime scene. Faded plaster walls and flickering fluorescent lights. Client chairs covered in cracked vinyl but missing clients. A receptionist sat at her desk, and it was a good thing the phone wasn't ringing, because she wouldn't have answered it. The receptionist was a life-size inflatable doll that bore a striking resemblance to Pamela Anderson in a bikini. Her desk was littered with empty cartons of Chinese takeout and stacks of unopened mail. Most looked like bills.
Victoria had never seen a law office-or any office-quite like it. The carpet, which must have been an industrial gray when new, was spotted with coffee stains, and the few clean spots were threadbare. The air smelled of dust and mildew.
Okay, so she hadn't expected teak wainscoting, but this…
What a dump.
She tried to suppress what she was feeling. That she'd been conned. That Solomon was a small-time shyster, a low-rent-strike that-a no-rent, flimflam man.
Steve tried to look at his waiting room through Victoria's eyes. He had always thought of his office as understated, but now it seemed downright shabby. But dammit, material things weren't important to him. How could he explain that without sounding like a total loser? He wanted to tell her about his pro bono cases-clients with just causes and thin wallets-but it would sound so self-serving, so defensive, he just kept quiet.
From somewhere Victoria heard a grunt, then the clang of metal on metal.
“That you, Cece?” Steve asked.
A woman's voice rose from behind Pamela Anderson. “No, jefe, it's Sandra Day O'Connor.”
In the space between Pamela Anderson's chair and the wall, a thickset woman in her early twenties lay flat on her back on a workout bench. As she raised a barbell, straining against the weight, cursing in Spanish-“Ay, mierda!”-the tattoo of a cobra on her beefy upper arm coiled and uncoiled.
She wore a sleeveless cropped tee and low-slung tattered jeans and had a cream-of-caramel complexion. Her neck seemed to be connected to her shoulders with thick steel cables, and her shoulders rippled with muscles. Her eyebrows had been plucked into diagonal slashes, one pierced by three metal studs, and she had a crown of curly, reddish-brown hair.
“Maldito!” the woman exhaled as she lowered the bar. “Who's gonna spot me?” Her accent was pure Little Havana.
Bobby hustled over to her. “Me, Cece.”
“Gracias, brainiac.”
Bobby kept his hands on the bar as the woman did two more reps, then, with a grunt, eased the bar down into its brackets. Still on her back, Cece looked up at Victoria and said: “El Jefe's got no manners. I'm Cecilia Santiago.”
“My personal assistant,” Steve said.
“Personal slave is more like it. You that persecutor?”
“Ex-persecutor,” she said. “Victoria Lord. Hello, Cecilia.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Hey, Cece,” Steve said, “when you're done working on your pecs, could you schedule a press conference on the Barksdale case?”
“Is that ethical?” Victoria asked.
“Would F. Lee Bailey ask that question?”
“Probably not. He's been disbarred.”
Cece vaulted to her feet. A printed message was visible on her cropped tee: “All Men Are Animals. Some Just Make Better Pets.” She had a second tattoo, a green sailfish, which seemed to burst from the top of her low-slung jeans and leap over her navel. “Yo, Lord. King Solomon tell you anything about me?”
“Not in any detail,” Victoria replied, diplomatically.
“What I done was no big deal. Sort of like choplifting.”
“Right,” Steve said. “You choplifted Enrique's Toyota.”
“My boyfriend. He was screwing my cousin, Lourdes, behind my back. So I borrowed his car.”
“You beat him up, then you drove his car off the boat ramp at Matheson Hammock.”
“Not gonna 'criminate myself.” Cece looked at Victoria with suspicion. “So now I gotta slave for two of you?”
“I'm sure we'll all get along fine,” Victoria said, not believing it for a moment.
Cece ran her bloodred fingernails over her abs, contracted and relaxed the muscles. The sailfish wagged its tail. “Look, Lord, I don't make coffee. I don't take your Needless Markup designer shit to the cleaners, and I don't type. We cool?”
“Cece types,” Steve contributed. “She just can't spell.”
“It's my lexus,” Gina said. “You fire me, I'll sue your ass off.”
“You don't have dyslexia. You're just too lazy to use the spell check.”
“Hey, Lord, hear that? He's saying Hispanics are lazy. I'm calling the EEOC.”
“And I'm calling your probation officer,” Steve said.
Victoria watched in amazement. She'd never seen such a lack of professionalism. How could she work in a place like this?
Cece laughed. “Good one, jefe.”
“You, too, Cece.”
They exchanged high fives, then bumped chests, like football players celebrating a touchdown.
Okay, so this was their routine, Victoria thought. First they trade barbs, then display affection. So now there were four people who seemed to care for Solomon. There was that old couple, Marvin and Teresa, who followed him around the courthouse; there was sweet, needy Bobby; and now this felonious, steroid-juiced secretary. What was his appeal, anyway?
Am I missing something? Or am I just too normal to belong to the Steve Solomon Fan Club?
“Okay, everyone to the inner sanctum,” Steve said. “Let's talk about how to win a murder trial.”
As Steve led his crew through a door into his private office, Victoria was aware of two sensations: the smell of rotten vegetables and what sounded like metal garbage cans banging against each other. Just below the grimy window, in a narrow alley, was a green Dumpster, horseflies buzzing around its open lid. Across the alley was a three-story apartment building, and on the nearest balcony, five bare-chested men beat sticks against metal pans and what looked like fifty-five-gallon oil drums.
“Trinidad steel band,” Steve said.
