often not required, only the name engraved on a brass plaque on a door. The firm claims association with three former Harvard fellows, professors of law. One of these is nationally known and appears with sufficient regularity before the Supreme Court that I have heard legal pundits sometimes refer to him as “the tenth member of the Court.”
The last three pages of the brochure are taken up with fine print, the names of partners and associates. Many of these are followed by asterisks and other symbols, all keyed to honors and awards. I find Scott’s name and after it a symbol in the form of a small dagger. I check the code: “former U.S. Supreme Court clerk.” I do a quick count of these. I am beyond two dozen and counting when I’m interrupted.
“Mr. Madriani.” I turn to see a different woman. Clear hazel eyes. She holds my card in her left hand as she extends her right toward me. “Trisha Scott,” she says. “I’m told you have some personal business to discuss?”
She is blond, her hair cropped in a kind of pixie cut that gives her tall, slender body a fairy-tale elegance. Her face is angular, bearing a becoming smile. She reminds me of a taller version of Meg Ryan, a kind of bewitching look that asks questions even in silence.
“How do you do?” I take her hand, just the fingertips, and give it a gentle shake as she continues to study my card. “I’m sorry to bother you. I suspect you’re busy, but I wanted to talk with you before I headed back to the Coast.”
“Will it take long? I only have a few minutes,” she says.
“That’ll be fine.” Anything to get my foot in the door.
“How can I help you?” She wants to do it here, standing at the reception desk.
I glance over my shoulder toward the receptionist. “Is there somewhere we can talk in private?”
“My office,” she says.
I follow her past reception and down a long corridor with offices on each side. Here the paneled mahogany walls are adorned with colonial lithographs elegantly framed and set off by small brass-covered museum lights. This is the “holy of holies,” province of former senators and senior partners, where most of the offices are double-doored with occasional cubicles carved into the elegance for minions, the obligatory personal assistant or executive secretary.
She leads me to another elevator, this one small and private. We descend one floor and exit into a rabbit warren of cubicles, clerical and other assistants in the center. Around these are arranged offices on the outside walls, where windows with views and natural light are the perks of junior partners and associates on the move, either up or out.
From the exterior appearance, these offices are not nearly as elegant as those on the level above. Still, they are large, judging by the distance between doors. Enough room to accommodate a good-size desk, filing cabinets, probably a credenza against the windows, and a view.
Halfway down the corridor, she turns to the right and enters an open office door. I follow her.
We are no sooner inside than she closes the door behind me. “San Diego,” she says, still looking at my card. “I recognize your name. You’re the lawyer representing the man who killed Terry.” Her countenance is less pleasant now.
“Carl Arnsberg. He stands accused,” I say.
“Of course. I don’t see how I can help you, but have a seat.” She offers me one of the client chairs across from her desk. The office is neat, not large, but there’s that view, what must be toward the west, as I can see a plane descending into what I assume is Dulles International in the distance.
She settles into the chair behind the desk, crosses one leg over the other, her hands set securely on the arms of the chair as if she were about to take a ride. “I figured sooner or later someone would show up. I pictured an investigator, not the lead defense counsel,” she says.
“I was in New York. I looked at our list of possible witnesses as well as those the state might call, and your name popped up,” I tell her.
“Why would you want to call me-as a witness, I mean?”
“I don’t know that I do.”
“I see. The police did talk to me. An investigator from San Diego. That was about…” She thinks for a moment, then riffles some pages on her desk calendar. “About two months ago now. What took you so long?” she asks.
I could say it was the absence of a good defense theory, but I don’t. “Can you tell me what they wanted to talk about?”
“Hmm?”
“The cops.”
“Oh.” She smiles. “Three guesses, and the first two don’t count,” she tells me.
“Your relationship with Scarborough.”
She nods. “Were we lovers?” she says. “I told them what I’m telling you, that the bloom was already off that particular rose. At one time we were what you might call an item, but that ended more than a year ago. I’ve been seeing other men, and I assume that Terry had someone else. We were still friends. I saw him occasionally at social events. We ran in the same circles. But that was all.”
“So you weren’t seeing each other at the time he was killed?”
“No.”
“Do you mind telling me how the two of you met?”
She has to think about this. “I believe it was at a dinner. A judicial affair, the circuit court if I remember right. That must have been three or four years ago now. Someone introduced us. One thing led to another, Terry called me up, and we started seeing each other.”
“You dated? How long?”
“What is this, a sequel to the Kinsey Report?”
“I have to think the cops would have asked,” I tell her.
“We lived together for a while. We had an apartment in Georgetown. It wasn’t much. Given Terry’s traveling schedule, he was never there. You have to understand that with Terry there was only one person who mattered in life, and that was Terry. The live-in thing lasted about seven months. In the end I decided that living alone in Terry’s apartment wasn’t what I had in mind. I found other people, another life. So I moved out and got my own place. That’s the long and short of it.”
“No angry words? No late-night disagreements?”
She shakes her head. “I can give you the address, and you can check with the neighbors if you like,” she says. “The parting was quite amicable. I left. When Terry got back from his latest fling on Court TV or CNN or whatever it was, I was gone. Simple as that. Sorry to disappoint,” she says. “No big blowup, if that’s what you’re thinking. I sometimes wondered when he returned whether Terry even noticed that I was gone. That was Terry.” She smiles. “You had to love him. I guess you could say the relationship just sort of ran its course. In the end we simply went our separate ways. There’s a lot of that in this town, politics and human ambition being what they are.”
“And when was this parting of the ways?”
“About a year ago. We still talked every once in a while.”
“When was the last time?”
“That we talked?”
I nod.
“I’d have to think.” She does. “It must have been last Christmas.” She toys with the fingers of one hand at the arm of the chair. “Yes, it was Christmas. We had some mutual friends who’d invited us to a Christmas party. I don’t think they’d gotten the word that we weren’t living together any longer. Terry got the invitation and wanted to know what to do with it. He called me, and we talked for a while.”
“Mind if I ask what you talked about?”
“What do two former live-ins talk about? The weather, our health, mutual friends we’ve seen…”
“Did you happen to discuss Justice Ginnis?”
With the mention of his name, she looks up directly at me. “No. Not that I recall.”
“You did clerk for him?”
“Yes.”
“I’d been told that Mr. Scarborough and he were friends.”
She laughs at this. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to or what you’ve been reading, but they weren’t friends. I mean, they knew each other. They were acquainted, but they operated in different orbits. Terry was a
