"You look different with your clothes on," she blurted.
If O'Neal had been sipping his tea, he might have executed a perfect spit-take. Instead he stammered and blustered while his wife fastened her bruised eyes on him. Mrs. O'Neal did not seemed altogether surprised, but she was certainly interested.
"I saw you at the Sweat Shop talking to Ava Hill the other night," Tess said. "You weren't not dressed-I mean, you weren't naked-but you had on workout clothes. Or squash clothes, I guess. That's what I meant."
"Of course." He turned to his wife. "Ava stopped me at the club, worried to death about the implications of her fiancé's arrest."
"Now that's interesting," Tess said, knowing she should stop, yet incapable of shutting up. "Because this was more than a week before Abramowitz died. Did you talk to her before and after the murder? Or were you lying just now?"
She was glad then for the length of the room and its high ceilings, for a smaller room could not have held the ensuing silence. O'Neal was now the color of a plum tomato. Mrs. O'Neal's face was impassive, staring off into the hills as if the matter was of no interest to her. Every inch a lady, Tess noted. Tyner looked furious-probably with her because she had spoken, and because she had not shared an important fact earlier. He didn't like surprises. But she hadn't realized what she knew until she watched O'Neal speak, seen the same bobbing gestures he had used when Ava had stalked him at the Sweat Shop. She was often the last person to realize what she knew.
"Oh, the sun is going down!" Mrs. O'Neal cried, clasping her hands together. It was the bland, borderline insipid remark of a woman trained to defuse tricky social situations, a woman who never had trouble setting a table, no matter how many sworn enemies were invited to the same dinner party. It worked, for her husband suddenly found his tongue, as smooth as ever.
"I talk to Ava all the time. She is an associate at our firm, with a promising future," O'Neal said. A vein throbbed at his temple, but he was otherwise composed. "Her fiancé's murder trial could damage that future. Clients don't like lawyers who have been too close to felonies and felons. Or law firms where people are murdered. O'Neal, O'Connor and O'Neill doesn't deserve this. We've always avoided publicity, good or bad."
"You brought Abramowitz in as a partner," Tyner said. "You must have known publicity would come with him."
"It didn't, not at first. He was happy to go to charity balls and have his picture taken. And, to be fair, it's really not Abramowitz's fault he became front page news by becoming a corpse. Your client gets the credit for that."
In the space of ten minutes Tess had reassessed her opinion of Seamon P. O'Neal almost ten times. He had seemed silly and harmless, then harmful. He had lied; she was sure of that. An associate who had failed the bar twice didn't have a promising future. But he wasn't a stupid man, merely someone with a radically different viewpoint. He had spent his career protecting large corporations from the complaints of individuals. It was consistent he should hold to this view when it struck close to home.
"My firm means the world to me," he said. "Its reputation is priceless. If you insist on going to court with this case and trying to build a defense on whatever your client thinks was going on between Mr. Abramowitz and Ms. Hill, I can promise you we will be of no help. The tiniest thing you want from us-a file, information about the girl's employment history, interviews with employees-will have to go through a judge. You'll need a court order to call me on the phone. And I don't think you'll get any cooperation from Ms. Hill, either. Wouldn't it be better if we were all on the same side?"
"Only for you." Tyner said. "And I could give a fuck about the Triple O. I would consider it a bonus if this trial damaged the undeserved reputation of O'Neal, O'Connor and O'Neill."
O'Neal's eyes flicked across Tyner's wheels. With his red face and beaky profile, he reminded Tess of a copperhead snake.
"I'd forgotten what a bitter bastard you are," he said. "I suppose I would be, too, if I were a cripple with only one accomplishment of note, and it was more than forty years behind me."
Mrs. O'Neal picked this moment to ask: "More hot water, Tyner?"
But her good manners could not save the tea party twice. "Don't worry about it, Seamon," Tyner said, his voice oddly jovial. "You've got a few years. With some luck you might have something to be proud of, something better than a law firm and your father-in-law's millions."
Tyner's line cried out for a grand departure, but the O'Neals' home, for all its graciousness, did not provide him with the unfettered passage needed to roll out dramatically. Tess helped him navigate the kilim rug and the slippery runner in the hallway, a thin rug that bunched up under his wheels. At the front door she had to help him back away from the door before she could wrench it open. When she finally threw it open, a screeching noise filled the air, a horrible sound that echoed endlessly up and down Cross Place. She had set off the O'Neals' alarm system, apparently programmed for automatic, as if they expected Tyner and Tess to bolt.
Tyner made his way down the driveway and swung himself into the van's passenger seat. The days were growing shorter, and the fading light barely penetrated through the trees along Cross Place. In the doorways of the houses to the left and right, Tess saw silhouettes of men drawn by the still-shrieking alarm. As her eyes grew used to the dusk, she saw one had a lacrosse stick and another held what appeared to be an antique revolver. Slowly the men started moving toward the van. Tess threw the wheelchair in the back, not taking time to fold it. The Wasp avengers had reached the end of their curving walkways and were still approaching, silent and sure of themselves. Tess leapt into the driver's seat and floored the engine, backing out of the driveway and burning rubber as she accelerated off Cross Place, the alarm screaming in their ears, the neighbors almost on them. She was on St. Paul, heading back to the city, before she realized the blue and white flag still flew from the antenna.
"I think I'll save that," she told Tyner, pointing at the wind-whipped flag. "After all, we might be invited back for tea sometime soon."
Chapter 17
After dropping Tyner and his van off at his office, Tess walked up to the Brass Elephant and ordered a Scotch and water at the restaurant's upstairs bar. The long, narrow bar deserved to be famous, if only for its martinis. Its regulars, however, were jealous and, as if by unspoken agreement, brought few new customers. Tess had some unresolved feelings about vermouth, but she drank martinis here because she believed in supporting artists at work, and Victor the bartender was nothing if not an artist.
Tonight, however, she was still thinking about all those golden liquids lined up in crystal decanters at the O'Neals. She was convinced their liquor was finer than anything she would ever taste, finer than anything she could buy, no matter how much money she had in her pocket. Then again, perhaps the O'Neals were cheap, the sort of rich people who bought inexpensive brands of Scotch and bourbon and cognac and put them in decanters so no one knew their pedigree. Scotch and water wasn't what she really wanted. Gloomy and out of sorts, she left her drink unfinished on the bar and went home.
Kitty and Officer Friendly were in their bathrobes, wolfing down one of those postcoital picnics peculiar to a relationship's beginning, when sex brings other appetites to life. Tonight they were working on a hunk of summer sausage, Italian bread slathered with olive oil, sliced apples, and Camembert. They invited Tess to stay, but her memory of O'Neal's blood red face robbed her of the usual pleasures she found in cholesterol.