I stepped out onto the deck and closed the door behind me. “Yes.”
“My partner’s family is due for dinner any minute. You can have me until they arrive. After that I’m going to be the best damn hostess in the high country.”
I didn’t waste any time. “You know Jim Zebid?”
Hesitation. Then, “Yes.” The yes wasn’t the least bit girly. The yes was almost totally “oh shit.”
“Something happened with him and Lauren last summer.”
“We’re gossiping, right?” she asked.
“That’s right. That’s all this is, just gossip.”
“Lauren won’t tell you, right?”
“Right.”
“I shouldn’t, either.”
I knew she probably shouldn’t, but I shut my mouth while she did whatever carnival act she felt she needed to do to juggle the moral aspects of her dilemma. Given her role with the defense bar, I figured whatever Casey knew about Jim and Lauren she knew because of courthouse gossip. Thus, her hands weren’t tied with the same ethical twine that bound Lauren’s.
Gossip is gossip.
Casey said, “Okay. I heard… I heard she turned him in to the Supreme Court last summer for disciplinary action.”
“For?”
“Serious stuff.”
I said, “He’s still practicing law.”
“These things take time.”
“What did he do?”
“Do I have to?” Just a little girly.
“Unfortunately.”
“He had a client who was accused of forgery, a petty thing. I don’t know the details, but I don’t think the facts are important. Lauren was prosecuting.”
“Yes.”
“Leave me out of this, Alan.”
“You know I will, Casey.”
“The rumor is that… hell. In lieu of legal fees, Jim wasschtuppingthe guy’s wife.”
I was speechless.
I heard a doorbell ring in the background. Casey said, “Oops, got to go pull on my hostess’s apron. Jim’s defense, by the way, is that it was her idea. His client’s wife’s. She proposed the bargain. Have a good Thanksgiving. Best to Lauren.”
“Casey?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks, and good luck with Brenda’s parents.”
She laughed. “I’ll need it. Domestic, I’m not.”
I clicked the phone off and stared out toward the mountains south of town. The sky that enveloped the mountains near Eldorado was the color of an old quarter. The wondrous rich colors of autumn were almost gone; the beiges and grays and blacks and whites of winter filled the entire landscape from mountains to plains.
Jim Zebid’s first appointment with me had taken place during the beginning of August. In the intervening weeks he’d never mentioned anything about an investigation into his conduct. He’d certainly never mentioned a conflict with my wife.
Why had he come to see me? I hadn’t been sure before, but I’d been working under a clinical assumption that it was because his chronic anxiety was becoming increasingly dysphoric.
That old assumption was mutating into something new. I was guessing that Jim had been hoping to trap me into doing something that could be construed as malpractice so he could get even with Lauren.
Now he had me by the balls. And I didn’t see a way to free them from his grasp.
FIFTY-EIGHT
“Somebody’s going to see us sitting here and call the cops.”
Carmen and I had pushed the seats all the way back on the Cherokee. We were parked on the same block as the night before, diagonally across from Holly Malone’s house. But this time we were a couple of houses farther away. It wasn’t a neighborhood where people sat in cars parked on the street. Inconspicuous we weren’t.
“That’s always a risk on this kind of stakeout, Sam.”
“This is different, though. Usually you and me, we’re the cops. Here we’re persona non grata.”
“Okay, you’re a Craftsman-style expert, and you speak Latin. What do I have on my hands here?”
I went through the list in my head: Fat-ass cop. Iron Ranger with man-boobs. Schlub whose family dumped him for the holidays. Post-MI jerkface who’s running around the country like he has the heart of a teenager.
Don’t know why, but right then I reminded myself that Gibbs liked me. It helped a little, as sad as that fact was.
“I am what I am.” Until the words were out of my mouth, I didn’t realize I was quoting Popeye.
Carmen tried hard to swallow a laugh.
I laughed first. She followed immediately. “Go ahead,” I said. “Say I’m a complete idiot.”
“A cop who’s a Renaissance man. Quick as a wink from Frank Lloyd Wright to Popeye-I’m impressed.”
“You done?”
She was wiping tears from her eyes. “Yeah, I’m done. Almost. So what are we looking for exactly?”
My neck was as far out as I was planning on sticking it. “This was your idea, Carmen. Remember?”
She reached into her bag and took a reprinted five-by-seven from her purse and stuck it to the center of my dashboard with some gum I didn’t even realize she was chewing.
The photo was of Sterling. He and his buddy Brian looked like a couple of male models.
“Who names her kid Sterling?” Carmen mused.
I didn’t know the answer to that question. “He’s pretty, right?” I asked. “Holly called him pretty.”
Carmen gazed at the picture as though she’d never really looked at it before. “Yeah. He’s pretty-boy pretty.”
“Not your type?”
“No, unfortunately, he is my type. My type-historically speaking-could best be described as ‘assholes.’ And from everything I hear about his life until the moment his rental car crossed that bridge over the Ochlockonee River, Sterling Storey was an asshole. Is an asshole.”
“Assholes?” It wasn’t much of a response, but it was the best I could do.
“Sad as it sounds, that about covers it. If I’m into a guy, he’s going to turn out to be a bona fide asshole.”
“Assholes have bona fides? Like diplomats?”
She found that pretty funny. “The ones I fall for do. I only take them in if they’re credentialed.” Her laughter stopped as fast as it started. “That’s what happened in San Jose. My asshole that time was a judge. He had credentials up his wazoo.”
Carmen had pushed open the front door. I walked in. “Yeah? What did he do to you?”
“My daughter and I had just moved in with him, were just getting settled in his house. I was in love.” She spread out the lone syllable of “love” so that it sounded like a crowd. “She called me from school, said she’d forgotten her calculator-it was one of those fancy ones with all those buttons, you know? I gave her a hard time about her irresponsibility and then I went home to get it for her. I’m a softy.”
“He was there?” I asked. The fact that he was there was necessary to the story, but it wasn’t sufficient to explain walking away from a pension. I knew there would be more.
“With my daughter’s best friend’s mother. I’d introduced the two of them at a volleyball game a couple weeks before.”
Nasty situation. But it still wasn’t sufficient.
“On the stairs of all places,” she added. “He was doing her from behind.”
Interesting detail, though it didn’t compare with what I’d heard about Holly and the basilica. But that wasn’t it, either. “It got ugly?” I asked.
“You could say that. I went berserk-I could take what he was doing to me, but what he was doing to my daughter and her friend? Shit! I screamed the woman’s naked ass right out of the house, but that was just a warm-up for what I wanted to lay on him. I started yelling and cursing-did I tell you I have a temper? Well, I do. And he took one step forward and… the asshole hit me. A hard slap right across the face. It was such a shock, it took me a second to recover, but then I started up again, and he slapped me again, harder still. I couldn’t fucking believe it.”