"I'm sorry."
"She was so young. She had always been frail, and she drank too much, especially the last two or three years. She was a lonely, unhappy woman."
"So your father raised you?"
"He tried. I was pretty wild as a teenager, and it horrified Daddy. He would have locked me in my room if he could."
There was a knock at the door. Chrissy reached across the table and took my hand. "Are we out of time? I really don't want you to go."
I took her hand between both of mine. "Relax. There's only a time limit in the movies. I'm your lawyer, and I can stay all day."
The door opened, and an enormous female jail guard toddled in, carrying a brown paper bag, a set of keys jiggling on her wide belt. She had cocoa skin and dreadlocked hair, and her nametag read "D. Scruggs."
"Hello, Do-lo," I said. "Chrissy, this is Dolores. If you have any problems-"
"You just call me, honey," Dolores said, smiling at my client. "One look at you, and I know you're in the wrong place."
"Thank you. I…"
Dolores was unloading takeout containers from the paper bag. The small room filled with the aroma of spicy pork.
"Chinese?" Chrissy asked. "You can order out here?"
"Jake can," Dolores said. "Anything he wants for his clients."
"How about bolt cutters with the moo shu?" I suggested.
"Don't be funning me," Dolores said, then turned to Chrissy. "Jake tell you about the last client he had who sat in that chair?"
Chrissy looked concerned. "No."
"Jake always advises his clients to show up in court clean and well dressed, ain't that right?"
"Do-lo, is this necessary?"
"So, this sister comes into the arraignment in a fancy suit, sort of avocado-colored, by one of your designers, like a…"
"Chanel?" Chrissy helped out.
"Yeah, something like that, with a double strand of pearls, the real thing. And Jake had just pleaded her not guilty to a home burglary, when there's this scream from the gallery. I mean, a woman screams bloody murder. Am I lying, Jake?"
"Actually, she screamed, 'Thief!' She was the victim, and she ran down the aisle yelling, 'That's my suit, my pearls!' "
"So, honey," Dolores said, "you be careful when you follow this mouthpiece's advice." Cackling with laughter, she headed out the door.
After a moment, Chrissy asked, "What was your defense?"
"The suit looked better on my client," I said.
"No, seriously."
"A wise old friend of mine taught me that lawyering is like playing poker. One of the first things you learn in poker is when to fold your cards. We pled guilty."
"Oh," Chrissy sighed, and I could tell she was wondering about my competence. Why should she be any different from anyone else? I opened the containers and peeled the chopsticks out of their paper. "Dolores seems very fond of you," Chrissy said. Probably wondering just how many of my clients end up in jail.
"Her name means 'sorrow' in Latin. My same wise old friend told me that. Do-lo put three of her own kids through college and is a foster mom to about a dozen more. Incorrigibles, kids nobody wants. When they get in trouble, which is often, I handle their cases."
"For free?"
"For some of Dolores's home-cooked ribs or special considerations for a hungry client."
Chrissy was already digging into the shredded cabbage and wood mushrooms of the moo shu pork. "God, this is good. Do you know what the food's like in this place?"
"Yeah, the Donner Party ate better in the winter of 1846."
We sat a moment in silence before I got us back on track. "Your father would have locked you in your room…"
"And I would have done anything to get out. Out of the mansion, out of Palm Beach. When a talent scout spotted me on Worth Avenue and said I could be a top model, I told Daddy I was going to Paris, and he yelled, 'You're only sixteen!' So I said, 'Mom married you when she was seventeen.' "
"Touche."
"Yeah, but Daddy said he doubted she would have done it if she had a second chance."
I gobbled a spring roll. "So you went to Europe."
"I was so-o-o-o naive. I had a book of photos shot by an amateur in Lauderdale. They were laughable, really hideous. Poorly lit, dumb, stilted poses like a kid pretending to be a model, my hair sprayed into place like concrete."
"Did you get work?"
"Not at first."
Chrissy opened a plastic cup of hot tea and took a sip. "I took my book into the office of one of the scouts for a big Parisian agency. They call them rabatteurs, the men who beat the bushes to flush out the prey. Only in this case, instead of rabbits…"
"Young girls who want to be models."
"Right. He was right out of Central Casting, a little mustache, a lewd twinkle in his eye, and he wore a white silk scarf in the office. Anyway, he offers me a glass of wine and starts looking through the book. He laughs, says something to himself in French, laughs again. 'Do you know what a go-see is?' he asks me. I tell him, 'Sure, it's when a model takes her pictures to a client to get work.' Then he puts the book in his lap, unbuttons his fly, and lays out his dick, right at the fold. 'Oui, but for you to get work, cherie, a go-see is a go-suck.' "
"This guy must have gone to prep school with Senator Packwood. What did you do?"
"I smiled sweetly, reached over, and grabbed the book by each side, then slammed it shut as hard as I could."
"Good for you!"
"Yeah, well, my morals didn't hold up as well after I ran out of money and was hungry."
"Didn't your father help you?"
"He would have if I'd asked."
"But you didn't."
"I didn't even tell him where I was."
"Why not?"
She stared off into space. A shadow crossed her face for just a second, and there it was again, that vulnerability and need. I am not a white knight bedecked in armor, mounted on a gallant steed. But if I were, I would have scooped her up, tugged at the reins, and spirited her away to a refuge in a forest of high pines.
"I didn't know at the time," she said finally, "but I do now."
Why? I wanted to ask, but sometimes the best questions are left unspoken. I knew Chrissy would get around to it, so I let her tell the story in her own time, in her own way.
"For the next two years, I was more of a party girl than a model. I went to Milan to build my book and fell in with a fast crowd. Figli di papa, Daddy's boys, Italians with trust funds. Some of them just want a beautiful girl on their arm; most want to fuck you and pass you off to a friend. When I started working, I lived in a models' apartment building the Italians called Principessa Clitoris."
"Cute."
"We just called it the Fuck Palace."
I dragged a piece of pork through the rice and tossed the mixture into my mouth. Outside our enclosed room, three male guards looked in through a window. If there had been a curtain, I would have pulled it. Behind them, a stream of female inmates lined up on their way to the cafeteria. Stringy hair, sallow faces. I wondered what Chrissy would look like after a year behind bars. Or twenty.
"I did the whole party scene," she said, "licking coke off hundred-dollar bills in rest rooms, skinny-dipping in fountains, parties for Arab sheiks, hanging with the disco droids. Amazingly, I was doing well, professionally at least. The makeup covered the dark circles under my eyes and I had a look that was hot, or so they said. I was traveling, making good money, but my personal life was chaotic and destructive."
"The men?"
"The wrong men. Playboys, married men, abusive men, starving actors, untalented painters. I was having nightmares, flashbacks that made no sense. I was bulimic one month, anorexic the next, then stuffed myself like a pig the third. I binged, gained weight, starved and lost weight, got depressed, got sick and was a total wreck. When I was fat, which was like a hundred twenty-eight pounds, the photographers would call me 'Flesh.' And when I was skinny, they'd call me 'Bones.' Finally, they combined the two."