“I don’t know,” she teased and looked me over. “It depends on how you looked in the prison jumpsuit.”
She laughed and reapplied her lipstick. Vicki looked stunning tonight. It was a formal event and was as close to the Oscars as we ever got these days. Tonight she was wearing a dark red knee length silk dress that flared out into a full bodied skirt. Her dainty silver heels were mired in slim, sexy straps that accentuated silky, smooth and toned legs that went on for days.
She was of Korean descent, and she had these dark features and creamy complexion that drove me batshit crazy. Her long black hair was pulled into a high updo with silver pins and revealed long, dangling diamond earrings. A pendant necklace gravitated toward a plunging neckline that held enough allure to turn heads, but enough sophistication to make me feel like the luckiest man on earth. Stunning. Absolutely stunning.
A cop came and knocked on my window, and I slid it open. I didn’t recognize the officer.
“You Henry Irving?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“We heard word you were out here,” the officer replied. “Mr. Iakova said to make sure you made it inside.”
She gestured toward the reverse traffic lane. “Go ahead and go around that way, and we’ll clear the way for you.”
“Got it,” I said and toggled the window closed as the officer directed my car.
“VIP treatment,” Vicki said. “Sexy.”
“You know it,” I replied. “I’ve got connections in this town.”
She laughed. “No, we’ve got connections in this town.”
“That’s what I said, ‘we’,” I chuckled.
She laughed. Vicki and I met at work. We both worked at a flashy entertainment law firm in Los Angeles. I was a senior partner, and she was a paralegal. We had that sort of coded office banter that in the movies, cues the viewers up for that inevitable passionate love scene over discovery files and Chinese take-out.
Which makes for great TV, but in real life, people aren’t that reckless with their careers, especially with high powered jobs like we had. So we kept it work appropriate, and just enjoyed the daily buzz of unrequited sexual tension.
Meanwhile, I defended sexy pop stars and entitled actors and got tangled up in multi-million dollar squabbles of, “he stole my song,” and “no, I had it first.” In high end designer labels and flashy smiles, I did everything I could to hide my small town roots and was doing a damn good job at it.
Just years out of law school, I was bringing in millions for the company and could tango with the best the City of Angels could throw at me. No one would ever guess I was just some kid out of Sedona, Arizona.
Vicki, however, had been stunted in her career. She never intended to be a paralegal, she wanted to be a lawyer, and she was as qualified as anyone. It’s just the California bar exam is the most difficult in the country, and as hard as she tried, she couldn’t pass it. It seemed she was destined to live with her dreams literally in sight, but forever out of reach.
Everything would have stayed that way, more or less, if my sister back in Sedona hadn’t gotten framed for a murder. I flew back home to help sort out the situation, and it was worse than I thought. With Sedona’s finest as a public defender, and the evidence stacking up, Harmony didn’t stand a chance.
I spent days on end sorting through evidence and security footage, and came up against wall after wall, her lethargic lawyer not the least of my problems. Then, when it seemed I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go with her case, there was a knock on my parents’ door. It was Vicki. She had heard about my quest in Sedona, and came out to offer her legal assistance. I had never been so grateful to see anyone in my life.
We set up a makeshift legal office-slash-love nest in my parents treehouse and then recruited the help of the only other person in Sedona that we found that might believe in my sister’s innocence. It was local crime blogger, nineteen year old AJ Castillo.
Harmony’s lawyer, however, was firmly settled on a plea deal that would send her on a nice little Piper Chapman quickie, with a felony record in the fine print. We went behind his back and did his job for him, and uncovered evidence that went all the way back to the Russian mob. But her lawyer, with whom we have since mended fences, would hear nothing of it. So, Vicki and I both busted our asses to pass the bar in Arizona, got licensed before the trial, and then ousted the crappy public defender.
After we cleared Harmony’s name, and the dust all settled, we realized we had something here. Vicki was now an Arizona licensed attorney, and AJ, who had been a somewhat directionless community college girl, seemed to have found her calling after cracking a murder case. And I had started my own legal team with nothing but a treehouse and a cell phone. How could we just walk away from all of that? Well, we didn’t.
Within a month’s time, we packed up everything, and Vicki and I moved in together into a cozy cottage in Sedona. Then, we got a small office space, and I started my own practice with Vicki and AJ. That was about eight months ago.
We’ve got enough clients to keep us busy, and now here we were climbing the ladder to the top of the small town food chain. And that was something. It may not have seemed that much to me during those L.A. years, but the longer I’m here, the more I realize,
