Things being the way they were with the Smerdnakov case, Martin would have preferred to stay home tonight, but it was hard to say no to Dahlia. Now he sat glumly across from her at the prominently placed table she had specified, on a raised area at the back of the room overlooking the other diners. The furnishings, mostly big, faux-Gothic pieces, looked as if they had come out of the House of Usher. The floors of the restaurant were done in a highly polished black tile; Martin kept waiting for one of the waiters to slip, food flying. The only good thing about tonight was that Dahlia would pay. They had attended law school together at American, but she had graduated near the top of her class, gone the corporate route, and was now a junior partner with Abel, Nichols & Feinstein, a firm that specialized in patent law.
“... at that party after the Gold Cup last spring?” Dahlia was saying. “You remember? That’s where you met Camilla and Tony. Anyway, last week, Camilla picked up and went off to Okracoke with Tim Lane, even though supposedly they weren’t going to see each other again. Not after...”
Martin hardly knew what she was talking about. He was preoccupied, not in the mood for light conversation. Despite her intelligence, in conversation Dahlia often lapsed into mindless chatter. All she needed was an occasional “unh-hunh” or a nod of the head, and she could go on for hours. But now she reached over and rapped Martin on the knuckles with the handle of her butter knife. “Hey, you’re not listening!”
“Sorry,” Martin mumbled. “Just tired, I guess.”
Dahlia narrowed her eyes. “Jesus Christ, someone might think you work for a living,” she said. “That was one of the reasons you didn’t want to go into corporate, remember? So you wouldn’t have to pull eighty-hour weeks.”
“This new case,” Martin heard himself say. “It’s a real tough
“You want to tell me about it?” Dahlia put down the butter knife. “Maybe I can help.”
Suddenly there was concern in her voice. Martin looked up surprised and studied her face. Dahlia was an attractive, confident woman in her mid-thirties with the blunt, practical haircut so popular with lady lawyers. She always seemed busy, happy, wrapped up in her life. But now he saw something in her eyes, an uncertainty he hadn’t seen there before. Maybe she was not as happy as she pretended. She had recently gained about ten pounds, which showed as a softening of the chin. She was getting older, and she lived in a beautiful apartment in a beautiful neighborhood — but completely alone, without love or even a cat. She had been married briefly in the late eighties to a Virginia hunt country heir who turned out to be a drunken idiot. There had been other relationships since then, a few serious, but she always drifted back to Martin in the end. They had dated off and on during law school, then drifted apart; these days they were old friends who still shared a certain intimacy. Sometimes they slept together, sometimes not, depending on her moods and whether Martin was dating anyone else, which was rare.
Now Martin almost told her everything, but he fought the impulse. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The usual bullshit. I’ll tell you some other time.”
Dahlia shrugged. “Suit yourself,” she said, and turned away to scrutinize the wine list, and there followed a bit of an awkward silence until the appetizers came. After that they were occupied by the food, and Dahlia’s talent for chatter returned. She talked about a couple they both knew who were getting divorced — they had seemed so much in love; they’d had a baby; then the wife started sleeping around — she talked about the weather; she talked about a movie she had just seen, about her job, which was boring, about her mother, a well-known eccentric, who had decided to marry an Arab met while shooting craps at an Atlantic City casino.
“That’ll be husband number six or seven for Mom,” Dahlia said. “I forget which. I stopped going three marriages ago.” She ordered another bottle of wine, and Martin drank and found himself actually being diverted by her chatter, and for a few minutes he forgot all about Smerdnakov.
“See, that wasn’t so bad,” she said as they stood outside at the curb, dinner over, waiting for the valet to bring around her Saab. Then without warning, she reached her arm around his waist and leaned up and kissed him on the lips. Much to Martin’s surprise, they ended up going back to her apartment in the Broadmoor and making love. It had been about eight or nine months since their last encounter. He’d almost forgotten what to do, what she liked. Her breasts were improbably large for her narrow frame; he busied himself with them while he remembered the rest. Afterward they lay together in her big bed in the dark and watched the reflection of the headlights of the cars going up Connecticut Avenue toward the Maryland line.
“You want to tell me about it now?” Dahlia said softly, just when he thought she was asleep.
“That would be a breach of ethics,” he said. “Not supposed to discuss cases pending in a lady’s bedroom.”
“Don’t think of me as a lady, think of me as a lawyer,” she said, and Martin put his fingers over her lips and could feel her smile. He understood now, without knowing how he knew, that he stood on a kind of threshold with her.
“Okay,” he said at last. “It’s not a pretty story...” And he told her about Genevieve’s getting fired and about the Smerdnakov case and his conversation with Tayloe of the week before.
“Maybe Tayloe has a point,” he said. “Maybe I am a lousy lawyer. Maybe I’ve been lazy or stupid or both. But there’s one thing I believe in, and that’s, well—” He stopped abruptly. Suddenly he felt embarrassed.
Dahlia squirmed with impatience. “Come on, Martin. Don’t stop there. What is it?”
Martin cleared his throat. “Justice,” he said. “Don’t laugh. I believe in justice. I believe that people are innocent until proven guilty and all that crap. So Tayloe gives me a homicide case, my first homicide case, despite my record, despite everything. Why?”
Dahlia didn’t say anything.
“Because he wants me to lose,” Martin said quietly. “Because someone, maybe even the FBI, called Tayloe and said, ‘Listen, we know you’re the public defender and all that, but we think it would be great if you could help us lock up this Smerdnakov guy and throw away the key.’ And Tayloe said, ‘No problem, I’ll put my worst man on the case.’ And that would be me.”
They were silent awhile. A loud siren started up from the fire station next to the Uptown Theater; bare seconds later the ladder truck howled off into the night. From somewhere in the great building came a heavy thump and the faint echo of laughter. Dahlia pressed herself close. Martin fell her breasts pillowing out against his arm. Her lips were a half inch from his ear.
“You want to get them?” she whispered. “You want to really get them?” Martin gasped as she reached down and took hold of him between the legs. “Then here’s my advice, one word — win.”
Staring down at his shoes, unusual two-tone wingtips in an extremely high state of polish, McGuin shuffled his way through the labyrinth of the PDS and presented himself at Martin’s cubicle about noon. He sat with some difficulty on a stack of document boxes across from Martin’s desk and, without lifting his head, raised a hand in greeting.
“I really appreciate this,” Martin said.
“I’m only helping out as a favor to Caesar,” McGuin said to his shoes. “If the chief hears about me taking a case out of turn, he’ll have my ass.”
“Of course,” Martin said. “I’ll do whatever I can to expedite the process. I’ve got everything you need right here...” He fumbled with the mess of papers on his desk and knocked the Smerdnakov file onto the floor. Documents went sliding across the brown carpeting, worn slick by years of lawyers’ leather soles. “Shit. Excuse me.” He knell and tried to put the documents back in order. McGuin snorted impatiently, his head bobbing like an apple.