A Case of Redemption (16 page)

Rich was going on and on about some deal he'd been working on, and from what I could glean from drifting in and out of his story, the client was a manufacturer of automotive parts acquiring over a hundred fast-food restaurant franchises in the Midwest, with the idea being that there would be a business synergy through drive-in services. Or something like that.

He must have noticed we were all glazing over a bit because he said, “I think it's time for someone else to tell a boring work story. Nina? Dan?”

“I don't know,” Nina said with obvious sarcasm, “how could we possibly follow your story about the burgers and carburetors clause with our boring, front-page-of-every-newspaper-in-the-country murder trial?”

“Just make it short and it might not be too painful,” Rich said, and then he laughed.

Nina caught my eye, as if to ask which one of us would accommodate Rich's request, but before either of us said anything, cries of
“Mommy, Mommy!” were heard, followed by Mia running into the living room. She was wearing a red velvet dress, with a white bow holding her soft curls off her face.

Just the sight of Mia made my heart lurch. I instinctively reached for my glass, only to realize it was filled with seltzer. God, I wish I'd said yes to that scotch.

“I'm hungry!” Mia said, with the urgency only a second grader can muster. “When are we going to eat?!”

“As soon as your grandparents get here, sweetie,” Rich answered.

“When will that be?!” she demanded.

“Very soon,” Deb assured her. “Mia, say hello to your aunt Nina. And do you remember Mommy and Daddy's friend Dan?”

Mia looked at me with inquisitive eyes. “Hi, Mia,” I said, an octave higher than my normal voice. “You look so pretty. Is that a new Christmas dress?”

She nodded. “You're Alexa's daddy, right?”

I hesitated, not sure what tense to use. “Yes, I am.”

“I miss Alexa.”

“Me, too,” I said, trying as best I could not to allow myself to tear up, at least not until Mia couldn't witness it.

“I'm sorry she died.”

“Thank you for saying that. I am, too, Mia.”

“Mommy says that I'm not going to die. Because Alexa died in an accident, and accidents don't happen to girls who are friends with a girl who died in an accident. So if one friend dies, the other one never dies until she's really old, like a grandma.”

Rich's ears were turning red with embarrassment, and he started to say something to shoo Mia away, but I talked over him. “That's right, Mia. You're not going to die like Alexa. You're going to get to grow up, and so you're very lucky.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I don't want to die.”

Mia turned and ran back into her room. Deb quickly followed, presumably to read her the riot act.

“Oh, God. I'm so sorry,” Rich said.

“Don't be silly,” I said, aware that I'd finally lost the battle to be tear-free. “She's really beautiful. Enjoy her.”

I was about to tell Rich I'd reconsidered about the scotch, when Nina leaned over and whispered in my ear, “That was lovely, you know.” Then her fingers brushed across the top of my hand, as if to emphasize the point.

Just the touch of her hand caused my nerves to settle, and a sense of calm slowly returned. When I looked back to her, she flashed that smile of hers, and for the first time in a long time, I actually felt a semblance of peace.

•   •   •

Dinner was nothing if not a true feast. Acorn squash soup, endive salad, rack of lamb, and more side dishes than I'd ever seen. Mia dictated the choice of topics, so they ranged from playing what she called the animal game—which was Twenty Questions, except instead of the answer being an animal, vegetable, or mineral, it was always an animal—to the type of pet we all wished we could be.

When everyone was sated, Deb directed us to adjourn to the living room while the table was being reset for dessert. Rich's father tried to get Rich to turn on football without being overt in the request (“Do you think the Auburn game is over?”) as Mia tugged on his arm to play Polly Pockets.

“Not now, sweetie,” Rich said.

“How about if Nina and I play Polly with you?” I said.

“What are pully sockets?” Nina whispered to me.

I smiled at her. The gap between parents and nonparents was wide indeed.

“Not pully sockets. Polly Pockets. They're these tiny dolls with rubber clothing. If we're lucky, she'll have Littlest Pet Shop, too.”

I reached down to pull Nina up from the sofa. As it always had before, her hand felt warm in mine.

Mia's room reminded me of Alexa's, an unruly mixture of high-end
furniture, an overindulgence of toys and stuffed animals, and the chaos of a child's imagination. Her bed had cat sheets that I remembered from the Pottery Barn Kids catalogue, and most of the artwork on the walls was Mia's. In the corner was the requisite bookshelf stuffed with the board books that Rich and Deb had read to her before she could even open her eyes, while open on the desk was the third installment of the Harry Potter series,
The Prisoner of Azkaban
, which was bookmarked somewhere toward the middle.

“Are you reading this, Mia?” I asked, pointing to the Potter book.

“Yeah. Sometimes Mommy and Daddy read it with me. If I don't know some of the words.”

I felt myself become choked up. Alexa had never gotten that far in her reading. She was able to read, but not a long book like Harry Potter. I couldn't help but think about how much I wanted to read to her again, and then told myself to stop it. There was just no point in thinking like that.

“So, do the Pollys have names?” I asked, plopping down on the floor next to Mia, in front of a large wooden dollhouse that appeared to be their home.

“I call them all Polly. This one is Red Polly because she has red hair,” Mia explained while thrusting a red-haired figure in front of my face. “And this one is Brown Polly because her skin is brown. You can be her.”

Mia created an elaborate backstory in which Red Polly was the mother of Brown Polly, and they were also apparently singers and had lots of pets. Nina's role was to make the animal noises for their “pets,” although Mia was careful to explain to Nina that the pets were not actually Polly Pockets but came from Calico Critters.

“Mommy, Mommy,” I said in a high-pitched voice intended to sound like a child's. “I'm scared.”

“Don't be scared, my little baby,” Mia said, maneuvering her doll closer to the one in my hand. “Your mommy is here and I'll protect you.”

It continued on like that for about ten minutes. As we each played our parts, I could see Nina looking at me with a mixture of awe and surprise. It was as if I'd revealed fluency in some obscure foreign language, like Mandarin Chinese, but in this case it was little-girlese.

“I'm sorry to break up all your fun,” Rich said, “but dessert is on the table.”

Dessert was chocolate fondue and homemade cookies. Everything was delicious, but as it wound down, I whispered to Nina, “I think I'm about ready for that scotch.”

“Right behind you,” she murmured.

“Thank you so much,” Nina said, rising from the table. “Everything was just perfect, but I'm afraid Dan and I need to go.”

“So soon?” Deb said.

“Yeah, I'm really sorry, but we have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning with an important witness, and we need to finish prepping.” A lie, which she delivered with an impressive degree of conviction. “So, duty calls.”

“I can vouch for my partner on this one,” I said, although even to my ear, I sounded less sincere than Nina had. “We really do have to be going.”

After our escape, Nina and I walked south down Madison Avenue for a few blocks before I suggested we get a drink at the Mark Hotel. I knew from experience that hotel bars are always open, even on Christmas, and I was not disappointed.

We took up residence in a corner booth. It was one of those tables with banquette seating, and so the place settings were catty-corner, directing us to sit next to each other.

The room was barely lit. It was so dark, in fact, that I had to tilt the drink menu against the candle on the table to ascertain the different varieties of scotch.

When the waiter came over, Nina said, “Two glasses of your best scotch.”

He looked at me to confirm, and I was glad to have spent the time
reading the menu. “Thank you, but we'll just go with the Macallan twelve.”

“Are you telling me that I'm not worth their best scotch?” Nina said with a look of mock umbrage.

“That's right. Their best scotch is probably a couple of hundred bucks a glass. I thought we could make do with the twenty-dollar variety just fine. That okay with you?”

She nodded sheepishly, which caused the waiter to turn on his heel, apparently not happy that I'd just reduced his tip dramatically.

After he returned with our drinks, Nina lifted hers in a toast. “To surviving another Christmas,” she said, but not without a subtle wince, which I attributed to her use of the word
surviving
.

“Oh my God!” she shrieked after the first sip. “It tastes like fire!”

“It's, as they say, an acquired taste.”

“Agh! Why would anyone want to acquire it?” she replied, her eyes watering.

I flagged down the waiter. “My friend here is a bit of a lightweight, I'm afraid. Can she have a glass of . . .”

“Chardonnay, please, now,” Nina said.

•   •   •

I nursed my one drink while Nina lapped me. After she had ordered her third, she began regaling me with the recent misadventures in her dating life. I can only assume it was because of the alcohol that I heard all about the anti-Semite (“No lie, he actually said, ‘I thought only Jews were lawyers in those big law firms' ”); the guy with the tiny penis (“He's lying on top of me, just about to enter, and says, ‘I need to tell you something . . . I'm really small' ”); and the guy who texted with another woman the entire date (“ ‘Hang on, I'll be right with you,' he kept saying”).

“Is this when I'm supposed to take out the world's smallest violin?” I said.

She looked at me hard, as if weighing whether she was going to commit to what she wanted to say.

“I know I can't go toe-to-toe with you in the tragedy department, Dan, but that doesn't mean that I haven't known heartbreak.”

“I'm sorry, were you in love with the small-penis guy or the anti-Semite?”

Her pursed lip and rigid jaw left no doubt that she wasn't kidding anymore.

“No,” she said. “Not them.” She let out a sigh, and then replaced it with a full gulp of air, and exhaled again. “But there was a guy and . . . I didn't just think he was the one, I
knew
it. The whole soul mate thing. And, of course, too good to be true always is. He was married, but he was going to leave her, just give him some time, and then we'd be together . . . . You know, the oldest story known to womankind. Anyway, I let it go on for far too long, and so I was good and hooked. I mean, the whole nine yards hooked. I had it so bad for him that it got to the point where I felt like I . . . like I had no free will at all anymore.”

She ran her hand over her face in a rubbing motion, although I knew it was to wipe away tears. When our eyes met again, hers were fully moist.

“If I'm not prying, when did it end with him?”

“Hard to say with any precision. There's been some unfortunate backsliding . . . but we've managed to keep clear of each other for a little while now. We still talk every now and then, but I've been able to limit it to just that.”

“You make it sound like a bad habit. Like you're trying to quit smoking, doing it one cigarette at a time.”

“More like quitting crack cold turkey, and then maybe you'll have an idea.”

For a moment I thought she was going to elaborate, but she seemed lost somewhere. I wondered if she was thinking about him.

“No, I take that back, it's worse than that,” she said, “and here's why: even though I don't have too much experience about the effects of illegal substances, being a semi-good lawyer girl, I imagine that,
with drugs, you know that they're bad for you, and so, even when you're addicted, you want to end it. But it's not that way when you're in love with someone who has that same power over you. When it actually happens, when you meet that guy who just takes your breath away, you think it's good for you, even if there are things about him—you know, like his having a wife—that you know are going to be a problem. You're really able to convince yourself that it's just part of the struggle that underpins all great love stories. That you're meant to be together, and so it's all going to work out in the end. It just has to, of course. What's the alternative?”

Nina was not looking at me as she said this, but her attention seemed to be off somewhere in the distance, as if she was delivering a monologue in a play and was speaking to the balcony. She had maintained a cheery facade during the soliloquy, suggesting that her remembrances were happy ones, but without any warning, her expression fell, and her eyes teared up again.

A
lthough it's the oldest cliché of detective work, the next morning Nina and I returned to the scene of the crime. Or more accurately,
outside
the scene of the crime.

Given the choice Judge Pielmeier offered us, we decided L.D.'s presence was not necessary to our walk-through of Roxanne's house, and Nina and I would handle it on our own. If we thought there was something L.D. needed to see, we'd revisit the issue with Judge Pielmeier.

Roxanne lived in a brick Georgian town house in Greenwich Village, on an alleyway street. What that meant, aside from the fact that her place was worth eight figures, was that she had no doorman, the buildings around hers were also single-family homes without doormen, and the street was extra-quiet.