“Yet she seemed to be concerned enough about Michelle to have listened to her whenever she came to the house with—”
“The black woman’s burden,” Owen said, and again studied my face for a reaction.
“Well, it must have been difficult for Michelle, don’t you think?” I said. “A foreigner. A white woman married to a black man. She couldn’t have had too many friends in Calusa...”
“I never heard anything about any difficulties Michelle was having. I don’t know what bullshit Sally gave you, but I wouldn’t trust anything she said. Did she come on with you?”
“No. Not that I was aware of.”
“Didn’t cross her legs so her skirt rode halfway up her ass?”
“No.”
“Didn’t shake her tits in your face?”
“No.”
“She must be getting old,” Owen said.
“What’s your impression of Lloyd Davis?” I asked.
“Who’s Lloyd Davis?”
“I thought you might’ve met him. He was best man at Harper’s wedding...”
“I wasn’t there.”
“And apparently he saw the Harpers socially on several occasions.”
“Oh, yeah, Davis. Big black nigger like me, right?”
I said nothing.
“I remember him now,” Owen said, and smiled as though he had won some sort of secret victory.
“Tell me a little more about Harper,” I said.
“What do you want to know?” Owen said, and sighed. “It’s been a long day, man, I want to get home.”
“Does he seem like a violent person to you?”
“No. Just the opposite. Gentle as can be. Used to bother him to have to take a hook from a fish’s mouth. Used to say fish had feelings, same as us.”
“Do you think he killed his wife?”
“Never in a million years.”
My partner Frank was still in the office when I got there at a little past six. He had not liked the deal I’d made with Willoughby, and he still didn’t like it.
“We’re supposed to be partners,” he said. “You had no right to go to him behind my back.”
“I had no intention of deceiving you,” I said.
“No? But without consulting me, you go to a little prick whose vendetta complex is well known in Calusa, and you make a deal with him that requires you to do all the shit work while he sits back and takes all the glory if he manages to win this case, which I doubt even he can do for a man as guilty as Harper seems to be.”
“I’m not convinced of his guilt.”
“Who’s supposed to absorb our loss, Matthew?”
“What loss?”
“The loss we’ll incur while you run all over town doing Willoughby’s work for him. The loss of your time, Matthew, the loss we’ve already incurred while you were off in Miami today, out of the office all day long with the phones going like sixty. To quote Abraham Lincoln, ‘A lawyer’s time and advice are his stock in trade.’ Our time is what we sell here at Summerville and Hope, Matthew, your time and my time, that is what we get paid for here. Now if you can explain to me how the loss of the revenue your time would normally generate if you hadn’t become obsessed with—”
“I’m not obsessed, Frank.”
“What do you call it then?”
“Look,” I said, “I don’t want to talk about this, okay? If it’s bothering you so much, I’ll waive my draw for however long it takes to—”
“And that’s not obsession, huh?”
“Whatever the fuck it is, let’s not talk about it any more, okay?”
“Okay, fine,” Frank said. “I’m going home. Will you grace us with your presence tomorrow morning, or are there other pressing matters that will necessitate your being away?”
“I plan to be here,” I said.
“I feel honored. If you have a moment, you might take a look at the stack of messages Cynthia piled on your desk. Good night, Matthew,” he said.
It occurred to me as he went out that in all the years we’d been practicing together we had never before that moment had an argument of any real substance. I went into my own office and found the promised stack of messages Cynthia had left on my desk. I pulled my briefcase out from under the kneehole and unceremoniously dumped all the messages into it. They would wait till I got home; tomorrow was another day. But there was one thing I wanted to check before I left.
In the cabinets lining Cynthia’s receptionist cubbyhole, I located the file I wanted, and then carried it back into my own office. It was beginning to get very dark. I snapped on the desk lamp, and then opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the whiskey bottle I kept there on reserve for clients who became overly distraught, as some clients were wont to do while pouring out their complaints to me. Rarely did I ever touch a drop of whiskey in the law offices of Summerville and Hope, preferring instead to imbibe on my own time, leisurely and hardly ever to excess, although my former wife Susan’s constant complaint had been that Beefeater martinis made me “fuzzy and furry and slurry” (her exact words) whenever I had more than one of them. In fact, and with all due respect for Susan’s judgment, it was Susan herself who’d made me fuzzy and furry and slurry. From the bottom drawer, I pulled out one of the clean glasses Cynthia always kept in readiness for impending hysterical outbursts, poured myself two fingers of Scotch, and then opened Sally Owen’s divorce file.
She had come to us in October last year, complaining that her husband, Andrew N. Owen (another N, I thought; what is it this time — Nicholas, Norris, Newton, Nathaniel?), had deserted her and had taken up residence with a woman named Kitty Reynolds, who at the time was living in an apartment on Lucy’s Key, over the boutique she ran in the exclusive Lucy’s Circle shopping complex. The woman Sally claimed had stolen her husband was described as a white thirty-five-year-old blonde.
I closed the file.
I felt suddenly weary.
6
I did not get to see Kitty Reynolds, the woman named in Sally’s divorce action, until four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Guilt kept me chained to my office desk. Guilt and Frank’s dark scowl. Guilt and a pressing number of duties that had to be performed for a varied number of clients before a deadline defined by the holiday tomorrow and my imminent departure on Friday for the nine-day vacation that would end the following Saturday, but that would nonetheless keep me out of the office till Monday, December 7.
My first call that morning was from a client named Mark Portieri.
“Mark,” I said into the phone, “how are you?”
“Lousy,” he said.
“What’s wrong?”
“I want a new will.”
“Another one?” I said, surprised. “Why?”
“To make sure she doesn’t get a nickel.”
“Who?” I said.
“Janie,” he said.
Janie was his former wife. The firm of Summerville and Hope had handled the divorce for Mark only six months ago, and had since drawn a new will for him that excluded his former wife from the list of beneficiaries.
“But she’s no longer named in the will,” I said.
“I know that. Still, I want a specific provision saying she won’t get a penny when I die.”
“You don’t need such a provision,” I said. “If she isn’t named—”
“I want it in there.”
“Mark,” I said, “you’re under no obligation to leave anything to your former wife. If the will doesn’t name her, she has no possible claim...”