Strube looked up at him. What dreary aspect of the man’s divorce case had they been discussing? Damn the chair. He pushed the “deflate” button several times, but the leather-covered swelling behind his kidneys didn’t diminish; if anything, it swelled more. But he put patient concern in his voice as he asked, “Best for whom?”
“Whom we’re talking about, Mr. Strube! Heather and Krystle!”
These, Strube recalled, were the man’s daughters. He remembered now that custody of the children had been the topic at hand.
“Well, of course it would be best for them,” Strube said, indicating by his tone that he was way ahead of the man, and had not lost track of the conversation at all. “Our primary concern is the well-being of Heather and Krystle.” Strube had made a bad impression early on, when, having only read the girls’ names on the information form, he had pronounced the second one to rhyme with gristle rather than Bristol
“But,” went on the father of the girls, waving his hands bewilderedly, “you want me to demand alternating custody of the girls, a week with me and then a week with Debi, and then a week with me again? How would that work? They’d have to pack their clothes and…and toothbrushes and schoolbooks and…don’t even know what all. Every weekend! Would Debi be supposed to feed their goldfish, every other week? They wouldn’t even know what was in the refrigerator half the time. The girls I mean.”
Rather than the goldfish, thought Strube. I follow you. “It’s your right—and it’s to their benefit,” he said soothingly. “For two weeks out of every month they’d be living with you, in a normal, nurturing environment, away from that woman’s influences.” He let his gaze fall back to where the fax sheets lay in a patch of slanting sunlight on the desk. Most of the customers for Goudie snuff were shops, but there were a couple that seemed to be residential addresses. He noticed one on Civic Center Drive in Santa Ana, and drew a checkmark beside it. Santa Ana was just an hour away, down in Orange County—that could easily be where Nicky Bradshaw was hiding out these days. Strube reminded himself that he would have to scout all the likely addresses, and actually see Bradshaw at one of them; he wouldn’t get the credit for having found Spooky if he just sent in half a dozen likely addresses.
And here was one in Long Beach. Why did so many people need to have snuff mailed right to their houses?
“That woman’ is my wife,” protested the client.
“For a while,” Strube answered absently. Here was another address, in Southgate. How did somebody in Southgate afford a luxury item like Scottish snuff? “You did come in here for a divorce, you’ll recall.”
“Only because she filed! I didn’t want a divorce! The girls staying a week with me and then a week with her—this is fantastic!”
Strube looked up. “Well, you won’t be paying child support for half the time. Besides, the arrangement won’t last for very long. Your girls will hate it, and it’ll wear Debi down, and then you can press for total custody.” To hell with your girls, he thought; it’ll protract the proceedings, and I’m paid by the hour.
The thought was suddenly depressing, and he remembered yesterday’s riddle about the lawyer and the sperm cell. He realized that he was hunched over the desk like some kind of centipede.
He spread his Nautilus-broadened shoulders inside the Armani jacket, and leaned back, lifting his chin.
And from the back of the McKie chair burst a sharp, yiping fart-sound. A wordless cry escaped his astonished client.
Still sitting up straight, though he could feel the sudden heat in his face, Strube said, “That will be all for today.”
“But—about the division of property—”
“That will be all for today,” Strube repeated. He would press for a Substitution of Attorney tomorrow.
One chance in two million of becoming a human being. He could work with the studios, handle prestige cases for famous clients. Swimming pools—movie stars. He could start by representing Bradshaw.
The client had stood up. “What time…?”
“Miss Meredith will schedule an appointment.” I knew him in ‘74 and ‘75, which was more than ten years after he quit showbiz, Strube thought. I’m likelier to recognize him than any of his old Hollywood crowd is.
He maintained his stiff pose until the man had left the office. Then he let himself slump. He could check the Santa Ana address today.
Maybe even the Long Beach one too.
LORETTA DELARAVA was crying again, and it was taking her forever to eat her ham-and-cheese sandwich. She was in a window-side booth in the Promenade Cafe; out through the glass, across the blue water of the Pacific Terrace Harbor she could see the low skyline of Long Beach, with the boat-filled Downtown Long Beach Marina spread like a bristly carpet of confetti around the foot of it.
She preferred to eat in the employees’ cafeteria on C Deck, four decks down, back by the stern; but she couldn’t make herself go there anymore.
When the Queen Mary had been an oceangoing ship, that C Deck auxiliary room had been the men’s crew’s bar, called the Pig and Whistle, and she liked the airy brightness of the present-day cafeteria, with the young men and ladies in the tour-guide uniforms chatting and carrying trays to the white tables, and the absence of obnoxious tourists. But yesterday, and the day before too, when deLarava had gone there, she had found herself in a low dark hall, with dartboards on the walls and long wooden tables and benches crowded with men, some in aprons and some in black ties and formal jackets. The men at the nearest table had looked up from their pint glasses of dark beer and stared at her in wonderment. She hadn’t been able to hear anything over the throbbing, droning vibration that seemed to come up through the floor, and she’d realized that it was the sound of the ship’s propellers three decks directly below her.
It had been the old Pig and Whistle that she’d seen, as it had been in…the sixties? Hell, the thirties?
And late last night she had left her stateroom and followed uncarpeted stairs all the way down to D Deck, and stood by the closed-up crew’s galley by the bow and looked aft down the long, dim service alley, known to the crew in the old days as the Burma Road, that was said to stretch all the way back to the old bedroom service pantry and the hulking machinery of the lift motors by the stern. From far away in that dimness she had heard a lonely clashing and rattling, and when she had nerved herself up to walk some distance along the red-painted metal floor, between widely separated walls that were green up to belt height and beige above, hurrying from one bare bulb hung among the pipes and valves overhead to the next, she had seen tiny figures moving rapidly in one of the far distant patches of yellow light; children in red uniforms with caps—she had peered at them around the edge of a massive steel sliding door, and eventually she had realized that they were the ghosts of bellboys on roller skates, still skating up and down the old Burma Road on long-ago-urgent errands.
She had hurried away, and climbed the stairs back to her stateroom on B Deck, and locked the door and shivered in her bed under the dogged-shut porthole for hours before getting to sleep.
THE SANDWICH was actually very good, with tomato and basil in among the ham and cheese, and she made herself take another bite.
The man sitting across the table from her was holding a pencil poised over the wide white cardboard storyboards. “You okay, Loretta?”