Courting Trouble (16 page)

Gil’s eyes glittered. “That’s blackmail.”

“That’s litigation.”

“Wait a minute,” Anne broke in before it came to fisticuffs. “Listen, Gil. This is all news to you, my being alive, my trying the case, and it’s a surprise. So why don’t you sleep on it and we’ll talk again tomorrow?”

“I don’t know.”

“Give me a day. You’ve known me a long time. I’ve done good work for Chipster, won almost every motion. We have them where we want them. If you want to fire me Sunday, you can. I’ll turn over the files on the spot.”

“Prudence is the better course,” Judy added, as if she’d been a Republican all her life. In red clogs.

Gil looked from one lawyer to the other, his expression impassive. “I don’t know.”

“Don’t decide now.”

“There’s one thing, Anne.” Gil rose to go, smoothing out his khakis. “I tell Jamie everything. She’s been with me every step of the way, from the beginning, even through the humiliation of this case. I’d like to discuss this with her, if I’m waiting a day. I trust her to keep anything confidential.”

“No,” Anne answered firmly. “Fire me now if you will, but don’t tell another living soul.”

Gil gave the table a resigned knock. “Okay then, I’ll call you tomorrow at nine.”

“Try after my memorial service.”

“Memorial service?” Gil asked, and even Judy looked over in surprise.

It was Plan B. Anne was throwing herself a memorial service, and she knew Kevin would find a way to be there. Then they could catch him, once and for all. “Yes, tomorrow at noon the office is holding a memorial service for me, at the Chestnut Club. It would be great if you could come.”

Gil snorted. “You want me to come to a memorial service and pretend you’re dead?”

“I’m sorry, it can’t be helped. You can’t stay away. The media will be there.”

“Jesus, Anne.” He walked around the conference table to the door, where he stopped. “Look, I’m not unsympathetic. I know you care about the case. But my priority is my company.”

“Leave that to me,” Anne said and pretended not to mind when Gil opened the door and closed it abruptly behind him.

As soon as the women were alone, Judy’s eyes flared with outrage. “I hate that asshole!”

“Why?”

“Aren’t you offended by what he said? That he hired you because you’re a woman?”

Here we go.
“Judy, I’m not naive. Companies hire black lawyers to represent them in race discrimination cases. Rapists hire women to represent them in rape cases. Everybody hires older men when they want authority.”

“I know that.” Judy raised her voice. “The question is, doesn’t it offend you? It does me, even though I know it happens.”

Go for it
. Anne braced herself. “But that’s not what’s really bothering you, is it? Because that’s not exactly what Gil said. He said he hired me because I’m a pretty woman. Frankly, he wouldn’t have hired me if I were an ugly woman, right?”

“Right.” Judy reddened slightly.

“And we both knew that, you and me.” Anne leaned over, leveling with her. “But you know what? It doesn’t bother me, because I find it ironic. In my mind, I know how bogus my beauty—my alleged beauty—is.”

“Bogus? What are you talking about? You’re perfect! Your face, your body, even in your new haircut. Men fall at your feet. You look like a supermodel.”

“I was born with a cleft lip, a unilateral cleft lip.”

Judy looked like she wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, and Anne sensed it would do her good to explain it, to say it out loud. She never had before, outside of a doctor’s office. It was her dirty little secret. That, and the fact that she’d been rejected twice for an American Express card.

“My lip, right here”—Anne pointed to the left of center—”was split halfway up to my nose, at birth. It’s the most common birth defect, and my case was relatively mild because the palate wasn’t cleft, just the lip. The vermilion, the surrounding tissue, to be exact.”

“Jeez.”

“Exactly. My mother, well let’s just say, didn’t have the best of reactions. She was a pretty woman and she wanted a pretty baby. One she could make into a movie star.” Anne refused to sound like a victim, so she shortened the story. “I didn’t get the surgeries I needed—lip, palate, even gum—until I was past ten. It took seven operations to get me to look like this, and by the end I felt like a science project. So when something comes to me now because of the way I look, I just laugh inside.”

“It must have been awful.” Judy swallowed hard, and Anne shrugged.

“I can’t take it back, my prettiness or my ugliness, and I wouldn’t. I just know that the world changed when I got pretty, and you’re right, lots of unfair advantages came to me. Men, clients. The manager at Hertz saves me a Mustang. The boy at the video store sets aside the new releases. Security guards at the courthouse run interference for me. I know how well I’m treated now, because I saw the difference. I’m a walking ‘before’ and ‘after’ picture. And I used to feel the unfairness, the resentment, and the jealousy. Like you do.”

Judy’s light eyebrows slanted unhappily.

“So I don’t begrudge you your feelings, and you don’t have to hide them from me. I feel more like you than me.” The conference room fell so quiet, Anne could hear the rasp in her own voice. She had never spoken so intimately to anyone before, but she had to clear the air. “And I have a confession to make. I overheard you this morning, in my house, but it didn’t come as a surprise. I know you don’t like me. No women like me. I can’t make a girlfriend at gunpoint.”

Judy emitted a dry laugh.

“I just hope that you give me a chance, because now you know better. When you think of the clients, the men, the new DVDs, and the perks that my looks bring me, think of the rest, too. Like Kevin Satorno, who’s trying to kill me. Beauty isn’t a blessing, Judy, take it from me. It’s a curse.”

Just then the door to the conference room opened. It was Bennie, bristling with excitement. “Ladies, we’re outta here. I just got a call from Mary.”

“What about?” Anne asked.

“Your murder. Let’s go.”

A
nne, in her white baseball cap and black Oakleys, Bennie, and Mary stood in the bright but tiny third-floor kitchenette. It had been converted from a corner of a bedroom by installation of a dorm-sized Kenmore fridge, a two-burner electric stove, and a baby stainless-steel sink. It smelled pleasantly of Lysol and home fries but was oppressively hot, despite the lateness of the day. A cheap plastic Duracraft fan oscillated on a countertop, to no effect.

Mary DiNunzio sat at the kitchen table across from Mrs. Letitia Brown, holding her hand. “Mrs. Brown, these are my associates, and they want to hear what you told me. About what you saw last night. Do you mind repeating it all?”

“Thas’ no problem, I like some ladies visitin’.” Mrs. Brown was seventy-seven years old, her black skin oddly graying and her eyes cloudy behind trifocals. Her glasses pressed into cheeks slackened by time, draped like velvety stage curtains around a steady smile. Gray hair sprang in thinning coils from her scalp, and she wore a flowered housedress with black plastic slip-ons. Anne knew she’d end up in shoes like that and she was actually looking forward to it. Mental note: Perspective sneaks up on everyone, in time.

Mary was asking, “So tell me again, what did you see last night, on the street?”

“I seen people, evabody playin, partyin’. I seen people goin’ out, goin’ to the Parkway, to the fireworks, the whole day people be comin’ an’ goin’. Plenty to see.” Mrs. Brown waved a shaky hand toward the window over the kitchen table, of rickety pressboard. Thin Marcal napkins had been weighted down with heavy cut-glass salt-and-pepper shakers, so they wouldn’t blow away in the breeze from the screen, clearly an abundance of caution. “Lots to see out this winda, better than the TV. In the day, I look at my stories, then I come over and look out the winda.”

“And what about the house I asked you about? Number 2257.”

Mrs. Brown wet her lips. Fine lines around them led to a small, parched mouth. “I seen everythin’ las’ night, at the house you talkin’ ’bout.”

“Which house? Show us.”

“That one, 2257. My eyes ain’t that bad, I see the number.” Mrs. Brown raised an arm and pointed to the window, and Anne followed her crooked finger just to make sure. It was Anne’s own doorstep, just two doors down, on the same side of the street. Mrs. Brown’s third-floor vantage point gave her a good, if parallax, view of anyone who came to Anne’s door. Though Anne had never seen Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Brown had undoubtedly seen her.

“And what were you doing, last night?” Mary’s voice was soft and even, uncannily matching the tone and cadence of Mrs. Brown.

“What I always doin’, settin’ here. Settin’ here and lookin’ at muh papers and muh pitchers and muh books.” Mrs. Brown gestured happily to a lineup of children’s school photographs, all girls with their hair neatly braided, and one older boy in cornrows and an Allen Iverson jersey. “These muh grandbabies.”

“They’re so cute.”

“And this here’s muh books.” She reached for a stack of crossword-puzzle books and opened one only with difficulty. Printed on the soft paper was a large-size crossword puzzle, completed in shaky ballpoint. Anne eyeballed ten down “three letters for place to sleep.” The blocks were filled not by BED but by QOP. She scanned the entire puzzle. Each block had been neatly filled with a letter, written in a jittery hand, but none of the letters formed words.

Mary looked back at Anne. “Her daughter and son-in-law live downstairs, with their two kids. They were out last night and weren’t here when the cops canvassed. Mrs. Brown stayed home. She was upstairs the whole time, but the cops didn’t know it.”

Anne nodded. They had met the son-in-law downstairs. A chilly young man who evidently didn’t like his mother-in-law enough to teach her to read, or even to come upstairs when a group of lawyers came to call. Plus they had central air downstairs, but only a single fan on the whole third floor. How could someone leave her mother up here like this?

“Go ahead, Mrs. Brown,” Mary said, encouraging the woman with a nod.

“I was settin’, lookin,’ an my daughter an my son-in-law, they all went out. An there was fireworks, above the roof. I seen the ones that made it high enough. Then there was a big noise, real big.”

“Not firecrackers?”

“No. Gunshots.”

“How do you know that?”

“I
know
. Mm-mm.”

“Did you see somebody shoot the gun?” Mary asked.

“No, I was dozin’ I think, jes a little, and my eyes, they come open”—Mrs. Brown opened her hands in front of her eyes, and Anne pictured her drowsy, sitting at the table on a stifling summer night—“and out I look and I seen that man.”

“What man? Tell us everything you saw then.”

“Young, pretty, white. Blond hair. His face all lit up from the house, from inside the house. 2257. I seen him and he let go of the gun, he sure did.”

Anne’s mind raced.
It was Kevin.

“And God strike me if he wasn’t cryin’, cryin’ like a newborn baby, like his heart was gonna break in two, and then he run, he run down the street, all the way, and I couldn’t see him no more.”

Anne couldn’t breathe for a moment. She had always known it was Kevin, but this made it so real. At least Bennie would be fully convinced now.

“I seen that poor girl’s feet, lyin inna door. She was wearin’ sneakers and they were shakin’, shakin’! Then all of a sudden, they stopped.” Mrs. Brown’s eyes welled up, and Mary gave her wrinkled hand a squeeze.

“If I showed you a picture of this man with the gun, could you say if it was him or not?” Mary reached into her purse for the red flyer, but Bennie stopped her with a hand on her shoulder.

“Don’t do that. I don’t want to take a chance of screwing up any photo array the cops show her. We got what we need.”

Mary slid the red flyer back into her purse. “Mrs. Brown, thank you for talking to us. You’ve helped us very much. We want to call the police now. Will you tell them what you told us? They want to catch this man and put him in jail.”

“Surely, I will.”

Bennie was already flipping open her cell phone. “Detective Rafferty, please, it’s Bennie Rosato,” she said, and she didn’t have to wait long. “I’m here with a witness to Anne Murphy’s murder, and she has described Kevin Satorno to a T. One of the neighbors. You want to pick up or shall we deliver?” Bennie paused. “Fine. See you at 2253 Waltin Street in ten minutes.” She snapped the phone closed and turned to Judy. “Carrier, why don’t you take our new messenger to the car and keep her company.”

“Got it.” Judy thanked Mrs. Brown and started to leave.

But something kept Anne rooted to the spot. Something bothered her about leaving the old woman alone. Something about a daughter who would desert her mother like this. Then she realized that for all she knew, her own mother was sitting in a stifling room on somebody’s third floor, passing the time until she died.

“Whatsa matter, child?” Mrs. Brown asked, her voice kind, and she eyed Anne even through her clumsy disguise. Sunglasses, baseball cap, or lipstick, Anne had been hiding something as long as she could remember.

Everything.
“Nothing, thanks,” Anne answered.

She followed Judy through the remaining room on the floor, Mrs. Brown’s bedroom, scented faintly of drugstore talc. It contained a saggy double bed covered by a thin chenille spread so neat that its worn white tufts lined up like monuments in a military cemetery. Over the bed hung a large wooden crucifix, and on the nightstand a doily runner, a small fake-Tiffany lamp, a yellowed Westclox alarm clock, and a worn Bible that left Anne with a thickness in her throat.

She hit the stairwell full of emotion she couldn’t begin to sort out, much less express, exacerbated by the annoying
clop-clopping
of Judy’s wooden clogs on the uncarpeted stair. By the time they reached the second floor, then descended to the first, which was air-conditioned and full of modern smells, Anne couldn’t say goodbye to the son-in-law because she wanted to throttle him, even with the police on the way. She headed for the front door, opened it wide, and came face-to-face with a man about her age, standing on the front stoop, about to knock.