“And I don’t like evidence being destroyed on Saturday.”
“I understand where you’re coming from, but…”
“Someone has to be covering at the courthouse…”
“Well, I’ll try, but…”
“Don’t try, Bannion. Do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And then go out to the farm and get that jacket and hat for me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Unless the wife’s already burned them,” she said.
“Patricia Lowell Demming,” Andrew said, “thirty-six years old…”
“She looks younger, though,” Matthew said.
“Born in New Haven, Connecticut, where her grandfather was a superior court judge. Lowell Turner Demming. Ring a bell?”
“No. Is that where she got the middle name?”
“Presumably,” Andrew said. “On the other hand, Lowell means ‘beloved’ in the Anglo-Saxon, so perhaps her parents named her adoringly.”
“Perhaps.”
“Knew she wanted to be a lawyer when she was seven years old and saw Gregory Peck in To Kill a…”
“Where’d you get that?”
“In an interview she gave to the Herald-Tribune when she joined the State Attorney’s office.”
“Which was when?”
Andrew lifted his glasses onto his forehead and consulted his notes. Wearing the glasses, he looked scholarly, almost judicial. With the glasses on his forehead, he looked like an eager cub reporter. Dark curly hair, brown eyes, an aquiline nose, a somewhat androgynous mouth with a thin upper lip and a pouting lower one. Cynthia Huellen once told Matthew that Andrew reminded her of Mick Jagger. Matthew said he could not see a resemblance. Sexwise, Cynthia said, and went back to her typing.
“Joined the staff just before Christmas,” Andrew said.
“Where was she before that?”
“I’ve got this in chronological order,” Andrew said. “It’d be easier if I…”
“Okay, fine.”
“She was graduated from high school at the age of sixteen…”
“Smart.”
“Very. Attended Yale University for two years and was kicked out one fine spring semester for smoking dope in class.”
“Dumb.”
“Very. She went from there to Brown, no less, where she graduated Phi Bete. There was only one incident there…”
“Dope again?”
“No, no. A fist fight. With a football player who called her Pat.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“Brown faxed me an article from the school paper. The incident made her a celebrity. Apparently this oaf… her word, oaf…”
“Nice word, oaf.”
“Very. This oaf came up to her and said, ‘Hi, Pat, my name’s…’ and she popped off and hit him. She later told the paper that pat was what you did to the head of a child or a dog, or Pat was a drunk sitting at the bar with his pal Mike, but Pat was not what you called someone you didn’t know when her name was Patricia, which, by the way, means of the nobility’ in Latin.”
“Did she say that?”
“Not the nobility stuff, that’s mine. But, yes, she said the rest, I’m quoting directly from the Brown Daily Herald. She also said that even the nickname Trish offended her.”
“Touchy.”
“Very. Went to law school at NYU in New York…”
“Law Review, of course,” Matthew said, and rolled his eyes.
“Surprisingly, no. But top ten percent of the class. Passed the California bar three years later and was hired immediately by a firm called Dolman, Ruggiero, Peters and Dern. Ring a bell?”
“No.”
“Stayed there for two years, earned the nickname Wicked Witch of the West, a sobriquet apparently premised on her courtroom manners. She moved from there to New York, the firm of Carter, Rifkin…”
“… Lieber and Loeb. Bombers.”
“Apparently. That’s where she made her rep.”
“As what?”
“Really ruthless defense attorney. Strictly criminal law. She’s successfully defended crooked oil company execs, Mafia bosses, Colombian drug dealers, tax fraud specialists…”
“How about murderers?”
“Three. Tough cases, too. One was a woman charged with strangling her six-month-old baby in his crib.”
“What’d she cop to?”
“She didn’t. She went for an acquittal… and got it.”
Matthew looked at him.
“Tough lady,” Andrew said, and nodded.
“What’s her courtroom style like?”
“Flamboyant, seductive, aggressive, unrelenting, and unforgiving. You make one slip and she goes straight for the jugular.”
“When did she cross over?”
“Left Carter, Rifkin for the New York D.A.’s office, worked there for three years before moving here to Florida. Apparently she wasn’t getting where she wanted to go fast enough.”
“Where does she want to go?”
“Washington is my guess. Eventually. With Florida politics as the stepping stone.”
“Like her boss.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who handed her this one because he’s got even bigger fish to fry. You haven’t seen anything in the paper about that, have you?”
“No, sir. What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“God knows. Have you found me a translator?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Check on the running time of Casablanca for me.”
“Casablanca, yes, sir.”
“And find out what time the tides came in and went out on the day of the murders.”
“Yes, sir, the tides.”
“What’s the translator’s name?”
Mai Chim Lee had been airlifted out of Saigon in April of 1975, when she was fifteen years old and all was chaos and confusion. She remembered her father rushing her to the embassy through thronged and deafening streets, her sweaty hand clutched in his firm grip, remembered him hoisting her up into the arms of a black American sergeant, the helicopter lifting off, people clinging to the landing skids, clawing for purchase.
She had not seen her father since that day. He had worked for the United States government as a translator; the Vietcong executed him the moment they occupied Saigon. She did not know where her mother was now. Perhaps they had killed her, too. She did not know. Three years later, when Mai Chim was eighteen, her mother stopped answering her letters. A letter from a neighbor, a woman she had called Auntie Tan, said only that her mother had gone away, she did not know where. Mai Chim could only imagine the worst.
She remembered her mother as a woman who smiled a great deal. Out of happiness, she supposed. She remembered her father as a stem disciplinarian who would smash teapots to the floor if his hot tea wasn’t ready and waiting whenever he wanted it. But he’d managed to get her on that helicopter. Mai Chim herself now worked as a sometime translator, although her main occupation was bookkeeping.
She told all this to Matthew as they drove in his rented car to Little Asia late that Saturday afternoon.
She also told him that her true name was Le Mai Chim, the family name Le — one of the three most common in her native land — having descended proudly from the dynasty that had begun in the fifteenth century, the middle name Mai meaning “tomorrow,” and the personal name Chim meaning “bird.” Her two older brothers, Hue and Nhac, had been soldiers in the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam. Both were killed in the Tet Offensive in 1968.
Mai Chim Lee — they called her “Mary” at the office where she worked, but she preferred her own name — had been in America for five years, in the hands of one governmental agency or another, before she struck out on her own. At the age of twenty she left Los Angeles, traveling cross-country by bus to settle at last in Florida — first in Jacksonville, next in Tampa, and finally here in Calusa.