CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“You seem down,” I said to Susan. “Would you like me to have sex with you and brighten up your week?”
She shook her head. We were at a small table in the high-ceilinged bar at the Hotel Meridien. I had beer. Susan was barely touching a cosmopolitan.
“That’s the answer everybody gives me,” I said.
“The parents of the boy who committed suicide are suing me,” Susan said.
“They blame you,” I said.
“Yes.”
“I guess they’d probably have to,” I said.
“I know.”
“You’ve seen a lawyer?”
“I talked with Rita.”
“Rita? I thought you didn’t trust Rita.”
“I don’t trust her with you,” Susan said. “I think she’s a good lawyer.”
“She is,” I said. “And a big firm like Cone Oakes has a lot of resources.”
Susan smiled without much pleasure. “So I’m employing Rita,” Susan said. “And she’s employing you.”
“What’s she say about the lawsuit?”
“She feels it’s groundless.”
The Hotel Meridien was in a building that had once been a bank. The bar was in a room where they probably used to keep the money. The ornate ceiling looked fifty feet high.
“How do you feel?”
“I feel guilty.”
I ate a few peanuts. Eating a few peanuts was not easy. Mostly, I tended to eat them all.
“Be surprising if you didn’t,” I said.
“I know. I know the guilty feeling comes from my reaction to the event. Not the event itself.”
“Still feels bad, though,” I said.
“Yes.”
I ate a few more peanuts, and determined to eat no more. The waitress brought me a second beer. Susan took in a milligram of her drink.
“You know what makes me love you?” she said.
“My manliness?”
She smiled.
“You haven’t tried to talk me out of feeling guilty,” she said.
“Be aimless,” I said.
“Yes. But not everyone would know that.”
“It’s a gift,” I said.
I could almost see Susan decide that she had been down as much as she was prepared to be.
“Tell me about what’s going on in that case you’re working on for Rita.”
“It keeps spreading out on me,” I said. “The more I investigate, the more I learn. And the more I learn, the more I don’t know what’s going on.”
“That happens to me often in therapy,” Susan said. “I know something’s in there in the dark and I keep groping for it.”
“That would be me,” I said. “Groping.”
“What do you know?”
“I know that Smith is dead. I know that I talked to a woman at his bank and she got fired and now she’s dead.”
“How did she die?”
“Appears to be suicide,” I said.
“But?”
“But she had just been to a lawyer about a gender discrimination lawsuit against the bank,” I said.
“So why would she be making long-range plans just before killing herself?”
“Yes.”
“It happens sometimes,” Susan said. “It is an attempt to convince themselves of the future.”
