Clifford Irving's Legal Novels - 01 - TRIAL - a Legal Thriller (11 page)

"Why, what is it?"

"According to the file, 'No Vale Nada La Vida.'"

Scoot looked puzzled.

Warren laughed coldly. "You don't know what that means?"

"Can't say as I do."

"It means, life is worth nothing."

===OO=OOO=OO===

Driving home to change, Warren avoided the crowded freeway and took a route along Main Street and Holcombe past the old site of the Shamrock. He would be at Braes Bayou by seven-fifteen, at the Astrodome by eight. When he turned the corner into the cul-de-sac leading to his house, he saw Charm's Mazda RX-7 in the driveway. It meant she had driven home immediately after work. She was not expecting him; he had told her he was meeting the Levines for dinner. Charm was invited too. "I doubt I can make it," she had said, "but if I can, I'll call Shepard's office."

In the hazy evening heat Warren saw that Charm and a man he didn't know were standing by a car parked farther up the street on the same side as the house. Charm's back was to him, her legs spread slightly, her skirt taut. She wore a pale blue suit — the $1600 one from Lord & Taylor, he recalled. The door of the car was open and the man was leaning on it, gesturing emphatically. Warren touched the brake of the BMW.

The man put his hand on Charm's shoulder, seemed to squeeze it. Then he placed his palm on her cheek and kept it there a few moments. Charm bowed her head slightly.

In their gestures there was an eloquence which Warren understood at once.

Slowly he braked to a stop next to another car about fifty feet away from them. The cul-de-sac prevented him from driving past — his house was near the end of it. He could make a U-turn and leave, or back up to the avenue, but they would notice that. And he couldn't bring himself to embarrass them by wheeling the car into the driveway. He waited, the air-conditioning vibrating gently, until finally the man stopped talking, bent to kiss Charm briefly on the lips, and ducked into his car.

He drove past Warren with not even a glance. Hands tight on the wheel, Warren stared at him as the car moved by. He saw a suntanned man of about forty with a mustache. The word
paramour
formed in his mind. He was aware that his lips, dry as bone, had pulled back over his teeth in a grimace.

Charm turned and walked quickly, heels clicking down the driveway, into the house. From his car Warren saw but didn't hear the front door close behind her. Yet he could imagine the sound as clearly as if he had heard it: the sounds of doors closing in your own home are so familiar, so personal.

Farther up the block, children shouted at each other. Roller skates rasped on concrete. Warren parked at the outer edge of his driveway.

Go in? Slink away? Go out and get drunk?

He wanted to shout in anger. He had a sudden yen for a cigarette and realized he had never lost the craving. He felt disgusted with himself. The heat of the moribund evening pressed against his forehead.

It was still his home. His clothes were there, and he needed them. He slipped his keys out of the ignition, got out of the car, unlocked his front door, and stepped into the cool hallway that led to the living room. Oobie stumbled up to him, wagging her tail violently.

I wish you could talk, Oobie. I'd ask you a lot of questions.

Charm was seated in a rocker at the pine kitchen table, drinking a glass of cold white wine. The creaking of the rocker was the only sound as she looked up with blurred eyes. There was a certain wild look too, and an anger equal to his. Anger masks fear, he realized.

"I saw you out there," he said. "I was in my car."

She stared at him in silence.

Warren's heart fluttered but everything else felt numb. "Can we talk in the bedroom, Charm? I have to change."

With what Warren perceived as counterfeit obedience, she followed him, carrying her glass of wine, and Oobie trailed behind, tail tucked hard between her legs. Oobie knew. Charm sat on the edge of the king-size bed while Warren took off his suit and folded the edges of his trousers properly into the press of the wooden hanger. The numbness was gone but now there was a ringing in his ears. I don't know what to say or do, he thought. It's up to her.

"Okay," Charm said at last, sighing.

"What's okay?"

He began the hunt for his baseball cap, stuffed somewhere among sweats and old tennis shoes and torn T-shirts with various logos.

"He's a man I've been seeing," she said quietly.

"Seeing?"

"Having an affair with."

He found the black Astro cap and decided to put it on his head right then and there. Each of his hands felt like twenty-five-pound weights, and he kept fumbling stupidly with the brim, aware that he was breathing as in a workout at the gym.

When he turned around, Charm said, "You look silly."

He was wearing a white shirt, red Jockey shorts, and the Astro cap.

"That's because I feel silly," he explained, while he felt the blood hum through his veins.

"What are you going to do?" Charm asked. "What's the traditional response down here when you find out your wife's having an affair? Do you beat her up? Stomp on her with your cowboy boots? Yell and walk out the door in what y'all call a mother huff?"

Her eyes had misted with tears.

"We do that sometimes," Warren said, "and sometimes we go out and hunt the son of a bitch down and shoot him between the eyes."

"Wonderful," Charm muttered.

"Just tell me about it."

Was she relieved that he wasn't yelling? That he seemed in control of himself? He couldn't tell. She didn't seem quite there.

"You want to know his name? All the salacious details?

How long, how often? You want to know if he's better or worse than you in bed? Is that it?"

"Please, Charm."

After a silence she said, "Just what is it that you want to know?"

That forced him to think and clarified something, and he said gently, "How you feel. What you're going to do now."

She cried for about five minutes.

He was used to that; she was a woman with deep emotions and a short fuse on her tear ducts, and sometimes she couldn't stop: like when the sewage had backed up and overflowed the downstairs toilet into the living room, or the time her immediate boss down at the station tried to take away her interview segment. Her father was a cold fish and had never really loved her — that was a recurrent theme. She hated Houston weather, the humidity of the five-month-long summer was unbearable. She was pre-period. Men didn't understand women and never would. Her oldest sister needed a mastectomy. These and other traumas brought riverine tears. The sobs made her throat hoarse.

Warren's usual reaction was to hug her and whisper to her, massage her back the way he'd seen mothers do to babies who hadn't burped. She summed it up once: "I'm insecure. It's common among kids from divorced families — I'm going to do a good documentary on that someday. My real father jerked us up and down the whole East Coast until I was ten years old. By the time I was twelve I'd gone to five different schools. I never could keep a friend. And then I got hauled out here. I have no roots."

"You do," Warren would reply. "You have them here. Now, with me."

But now in the bedroom in the fading light he didn't comfort her with his hands or soothe her with his words. He no longer knew how.

She went to the bathroom to wash her face. During that time Warren put on a pair of freshly washed jeans, a clean white shirt, and his cotton windbreaker. Promises to keep, miles to go before I sleep, as the poet said. He sat on the floor and worked his feet into the old cowhide boots.

When she came out, he repeated, "Tell me about it."

"That won't help."

He understood she was referring to herself. There was a terrible meaning to the words.

"Maybe it will help
me
, Charm."

She was thoughtful for a while, perched once more on the bed, a box of Kleenex at her side.

"All right. Maybe it will."

He was a lawyer — civil, not criminal. A partner in a big firm. Which one? Never mind. He was from New York. His name? Beside the point. A few months ago he'd had some business at the station, some potential libel suit, and he had come over from his hotel and questioned her. They had a margarita, then dinner.

"We liked each other. He was bright, and funny. So we decided to be friends. I never told you because, frankly, you and I have been leading pretty separate lives this last year."

"Not my choice," Warren pointed out.

"Are you going to argue and interrupt? If so—"

"Go ahead, Charm."

The man had returned to New York, but he'd called several times and then come again for a week on the lawsuit business. She had seen him, and they had started an affair. He was in love with her, he claimed. She wasn't sure how she felt about him. She might have been in love with him too.

"Have been, or are?"

"I don't know the answer to that."

In love with.
He wanted to tell her that was chemistry and lust, nature's way of getting the species to propagate. Nature's dirty trick. Chemistry was unstable. Lust ebbed and flowed. She loved
him,
she was his wife. They were partners, companions. That had substance, richness, longevity.

But none of this could he squeeze into acceptable words. He tried to make his thoughts show in his eyes and propel themselves across to where she sat hunched on the edge of the bed.

Her lover kept calling her from New York. He took two weeks off and flew out a third time. He was separated from his wife back in Manhattan, awaiting a final divorce decree. He had three children. He hadn't been looking for something like this to happen to him so soon after the breakup of his marriage, but it had happened.

"Three children. Jesus," Warren muttered.

"Is that meant to be a snide comment?"

"It just slipped out. How do you feel about all this?"

"Confused."

"I can imagine. And what about our marriage?"

That was at the root of everything, wasn't it? She wouldn't have begun the affair if the marriage wasn't failing her in some fundamental way. She had lost faith in Warren—she saw him as a man going nowhere, a man, as she'd said a while ago, with no zest left in him. Their sex life had improved, then waned. He didn't communicate with her; hadn't for a year, not since their try at therapy. What was going on inside him, behind the shell? She had no idea. All their dinner parties were with lawyer couples, and the only subject was what went on at the courthouse: the endless sarcastic analysis of cases, judges, prosecutors — lousy legal gossip. Outside of work, her life was dull. Unfulfilled. He bored her. Probably, doing all this court-appointed stuff, and putting on his chef's cap to make his cordon bleu, and using the remote to flip through the forty-seven TV channels after dinner while he sat mired in his easy chair, he bored himself. That was the impression he gave. Maybe she wasn't in love with him anymore.

"'In love' is an irrational state. But you love me," he said doggedly. "There's a difference."

"Don't treat me like an adolescent. I understand the difference. Yes, I do love you. I care for you. And the last few years I've felt sorry for you."

No more than I've felt for myself, he thought. But it wasn't like that anymore. He wanted to tell her that, but the words felt pretentious and silly, and wouldn't come.

"Do you want to leave me and marry this guy?"

"He puts a lot of pressure on me."

"That's not an answer, Charm."

"I don't know what I want to do."

He glanced at his watch. It was ten minutes to eight. "I'm sorry," he said. "More than you know. I guess I've been letting you down. Maybe you've been letting me down too. I want to talk to you about all that. And I'm also sorry that I have to go. We'll talk when I get back. Or else tomorrow."

Charm's blurry eyes took on some heat. "You're going? Now? Where?"

He was already headed to the bedroom door, reaching for his car keys in the pocket of his jeans.

"To the ball game, with Scoot Shepard and a client."

"Are you serious? To the ball game, when our lives are falling apart?"

"I have to go. It's business." He hated the words even as he said them.

She jumped off the bed and hurried after him, barefoot, through the hall and the living room to the vestibule. When his hand was on the front doorknob, he turned to face her.

"
Fuck you
!" she shouted.

He put a hand out to touch her shoulder, but she jerked back from him. He said softly, "Charm, listen carefully. I still love you, and I won't let you go."

He opened the door and stepped outside into the thick evening warmth. It had grown nearly dark. Then he turned and said more strongly, "As for this New York lawyer with the wife and three kids — his story is as sorry as a two-dollar watch. I'll bet he drinks martinis before dinner and wears shirts with alligators on the pocket. If I ever catch him hanging around my house again, it's him I'll stomp on."

But saying all that didn't make him feel any better. Driving to the Astrodome he felt a fool, a cuckold, a homeless man. As homeless as Hector Quintana. In the car, he cried.

The Astros took an early lead on a home run by Glenn Davis
with two aboard, and the crowd in the air-conditioned Dome grew boisterous. From the box seats behind third base, Warren cheered and hooted. Ordinarily he was not a great fan of the Houston team, but he had a particular rooting interest tonight against the New York Mets.

"Pile it on!" he yelled, after the home run. "Let's go!"

Mike Scott was pitching for the Astros. "Show 'em the spitter, Mike! No mercy!"

At his side, Johnnie Faye Boudreau gave a snort of laughter. "You sure are having a good time, Mr. Blackburn. I appreciate that kind of enthusiasm."

Scoot drank Wild Turkey from a silver flask. Warren and Johnnie Faye and a man named Frank Sawyer, who said he was from Alabama, drank beer from plastic cups. Sawyer was clean-shaven, about thirty, with light blue eyes and close-cropped fair hair. He seldom spoke, and forced a reluctant half-smile whenever Warren looked over at him. Military, Warren decided. He seemed to be both bodyguard and stud. A bouncer at her club, Johnnie Faye said. I'd like to hire him, Warren thought, to bounce that fucking New York lawyer.