watching Bigby make out with Victoria in the glow of a smudge pot. “I mean it. You need the fields set on fire, just call me.”
“You burn sugarcane fields, not avocado trees. But a mighty decent offer.” Bigby dropped his voice to a whisper. “Say, Vic told me. I'm sorry about the doctor's report.” He shot a look at Bobby. “Are we allowed to talk about it in front of-?”
“I'm not deaf, dipshit,” Bobby said.
“Bobby!” Steve said.
“My fault,” Bigby said. “Robert, I apologize.”
“So just why are you here, hon?” Victoria asked.
To Steve, she sounded on edge. Not quite “what the hell are you doing in my office when I've got work to do?” But maybe just a tinge of annoyance.
“The wedding, sweetie,” Bigby said. “You do remember?”
“It's all she talks about,” Steve said, and Victoria gave him a warning look.
“I'm a little busy right now,” she said.
Bigby spread the contents of a file on her desk. “Seating charts, floral arrangements, musical selections, speeches to write. Really, sweetie, we're way behind the curve.”
“I'm sorry, Bruce, but it's been hectic here.”
“I know. I know. Murder and all, but really…”
“Look, I'm gonna take a walk on the beach,” Steve said. “You two stay here and pick out place settings.” He preferred a colonoscopy with a garden hose to listening to their wedding plans.
“We could use your help with final menu choices,” Bigby said.
“I'm partial to barbecue,” Steve said.
“Not unless it's made of tofu,” Bigby reminded him.
Steve got to his feet. “I'll be at Tenth Street Beach if you need me.”
“Isn't that the topless beach?”
“Funny, I never noticed.”
“Hang on a sec, Steve. I want to ask you for a favor.”
“Anything, Bruce.”
“I'd be honored if you'd be one of our ushers.”
“Me? I don't have any training.”
“You'll learn at the rehearsal.”
“I don't know. Somebody trips and falls, they might sue me.”
“Just think about it. And do you want to sit on the bride's side or the groom's side of the church?”
“The Jewish side,” Steve said.
The intercom buzzed again, and Cece announced that State Attorney Pincher was calling. Steve and Victoria exchanged looks-What's he want?-and Steve hit the speaker button. “Hey, Sugar Ray. Coerce any confessions today?”
“Got that discovery you requested.” Faint amusement tickled his voice.
“Great. I'll send my courier over.”
“You don't have a courier.”
“I forgot. Be a pal and send the stuff over with one of yours.”
“Oh, I think you and your partner ought to come over here, pronto.”
“Yeah, why's that?” Steve heard laughter in the background. He pictured an office filled with Pincher's flunkies.
“'Cause I want to see your face when your case goes straight to Hades.” Again, the ripple of sycophantic laughter. The phone clicked dead.
Steve turned to Victoria. “Pincher's gonna sandbag us, but I don't know how.”
“Then the sooner the better.”
“Right. Let's get going.”
Victoria gathered some papers, dumped them in a briefcase. No muss, no fuss. Steve admired how she just got down to business, readied for the fight.
“Sorry, hon,” she said. “The menus and seating charts will have to wait.”
“And the flowers?” Bigby said.
“You choose. Really, Bruce. You're better at it than I am.”
“If you say so,” Bigby said, disappointed.
“I'm partial to birds of paradise,” Steve said, heading for the door.
8. There is some shit I will not eat.
Thirty-one
MY PARTNER
“What happened to your face, Solomon?” Ray Pincher asked. “Your secretary beat you up?”
Steve put on his best Jack Nicholson: “Your wife got excited and crossed her legs a little too quick.”
Pincher scowled, but his crew-two female prosecutors and Delvin Farnsworth, the homicide detective- snickered.
“Hated that movie,” Pincher said. “Evil prevailed. ‘It's Chinatown, Jake.' What kind of crap is that?”
“What do you have for us, Ray?” Steve wasn't being paid enough to listen to Pincher's movie reviews.
“I'm getting there,” Pincher said.
Victoria and Steve were sitting on one side of a long rectangular table in Pincher's conference room. There was a nice view from the windows, if you like concrete expressway trestles fifty feet high.
Pincher was wearing a jet black vested suit with a lavender shirt, lavender tie, and lavender kerchief in his pocket. Way too much lavender for Steve's taste. “Solomon is usually a formidable opponent,” Pincher said, turning to the detective. “Reprehensible, but formidable. Lately, though, he's been off his game.”
“We drove over here for this?” Steve said.
“Maybe it's because this case is out of his league,” Pincher continued serenely.
That again, Steve thought. Why had a discovery session turned adversarial before it had even begun?
Sitting next to Pincher, Farnsworth scratched his mustache with a knuckle. Taking notes-or doodling, Steve couldn't tell which-were the two prosecutors, Gloria Mendez and Miranda Cooper. Steve knew both women as competent but skittish in the courtroom. Neither one would give you a decent plea deal, terrified of being upbraided by their boss. Like most young ASAs, they'd made a Faustian bargain. If they could put up with their egomaniacal boss for a few years, laugh at his jokes, remind him of his brilliance, Pincher would pave the way to a deep-carpet firm downtown.
Steve had never been able to make those kind of compromises. He remembered being only eight or nine when his father starting calling him “Olaf,” but never told him why. Years later, in English class at Beach High, Steve read the e.e. cummings poem “i sing of Olaf glad and big.” And there he was, in iambic tetrameter: “There is some shit I will not eat.”
It would make a good law, he decided, mindful that Olaf spoke the defiant words while red-hot bayonets were jammed up his ass.
“Solomon completely misread his client,” Pincher continued. “Like a sloppy base runner, he gets picked off. That right, Last Out?”
“Let's just get this over with,” Steve said, in no mood for Pincher's bullshit.
“My guess, he's preoccupied by his own squabble over in kiddie court.”
The son-of-a-bitch. Goading me about Bobby.
“Why don't we just stick to this case?” Victoria said.
“How is that nephew of yours, Solomon?” Pincher asked, ignoring her.
Steve wouldn't take the bait. “Bobby's fine. Thank you for asking.”
