Legal Tender (12 page)

“It’s poison, and then there’s the bacteria. Things grow in meat. Things you can’t see.” She flicked crayon-black bangs off a face that would be pretty but for its hardness. Her eye makeup was heavy and her spandex dress eye-catching. Her arm was still in a sling, but that was the only souvenir of her fracas with the police.

I wanted to swing the conversation around to her death threat without betraying Bill’s confidence. “Bill told me all about the lab, Eileen. You must’ve seen some terrible stuff.”

“I did.”

“Are Furstmann’s labs worse than others?”

She scratched under her cast. “What do you care? You’re not even our lawyer.”

Ouch. “That guy with the ridiculous briefcase my replacement?”

“What’d you expect?” she said, with a savvy laugh. Her gaze wandered around the restaurant, so I surveyed the place. It was empty except for an old man chain-smoking in the far corner. The dinner rush was over, nobody was coming in. What was Eileen looking at? Then I realized she didn’t want to see, she wanted to be seen.

“How’d you find this lawyer, Eileen?”

“Celeste? He found me. He saw me on the news. I was on all the channels, even cable.”

“Is he the one who bailed you out?”

“He wants to sue the police and the city. He says we can get five hundred thou, maybe more, and that’s only from the lawsuit.”

Bill shifted in his slippery seat. “He said he’ll help us stop the experiments, too. That’s what we want to do.”

Eileen nodded. “Stop them dead.”

I felt a chill and leaned forward. “Eileen, nothing you can do will stop the experiments. The pressure for an AIDS cure is too great. I told Bill you ought to go after the fur companies instead of the drug companies. Remember, Bill?”

“Yuh,” Bill nodded.

“I worked at Furstmann Dunn. I saw what they did,” Eileen said.

“But people aren’t ready to deal with animal experimentation yet, Eileen. Go after fur. The celebrities are all against it.”

“Celebrities? Like who?” She inched forward on her chair, and for the first time interest glimmered in her eyes.

“Uh, Elle MacPherson.”

“I like Elle. She’s in the movies, like Rene Russo. Did you know Rene Russo was a model before she did that movie with John Travolta? She gets a lot of movie work.”

“Really. You have momentum, since you had all the TV cameras and everything. Why don’t you keep it alive by going after the fur companies? I don’t know if Bill told you, but I represent a lot of radicals, a lot of protesters.”

“Any celebrities?”

Christ. “No. No celebrities. And they, my clients, always use the press when they have it. It helps them win people over, get a lot of followers.”

“Followers?”

“Sure.”

She paused. “I gotta ask you something though.”

“What?”

“Did you really kill your boyfriend?”

I felt a pang, deep inside my chest. “No.”

“Oh,” she said.

Her foot wagging.

“You, a murderer? How could they think such a thing?” Hattie said. She’d been waiting up, wrapped like a Havana cigar in her bathrobe, with her hair in pink foam curlers. She looked exhausted, her skin greasy and her eyes dark and sunken. “How could they even think it?”

“They’re cops. They can think anything.” I scratched Bear, asleep under the table, and stirred my umpteenth cup of coffee. I was fatigued, too, but satisfied that Eileen had forgotten about the CEO.

“The cops were upstairs, you know. They turned your apartment upside down. They woulda broke down the door if I hadn’t stopped ’em.”

“Sorry. I should’ve warned you when I called.”

“They left your place a damn mess! I tried to put it together, but your mother was gettin’ upset.”

My heart sank. “Did they bother her? Did she see them?”

“I calmed her down.” Hattie passed some papers across the table to me. “Here’s a list of the things they took. The detective told me to give it to you.”

I pushed the papers away. “Which detective?”

“I don’t know. Mean-lookin’, funny name.”

“Azzic?”

She nodded.

“Tell me how Mom is.”

“In bed, from ten o’clock. She hadn’t slep’ a wink. Don’t they know what they’re doin’ to you?”

“They don’t care. Did she eat?”

“They should care! It was a crazy house here today! That detective, askin’ questions. They even went lookin’ for your car, to search that, too. The dog was barkin’, your phone was ringin’ all day. One of the girls came with a box of stuff from your office and took it upstairs. Black girl.”

“Renee Butler?”

She nodded again and rubbed her forehead irritably. “What a day. Reporters, buzzin’ at the door through dinnertime. I went out there and ran them off! They called you a murderer!”

“That’s what they’ll keep calling me, until I can prove I’m not.”

“You, with that rowing! It’s what got you into this mess!”

“Not exactly—”

“I told you you should stop. You don’t listen to me, you don’t listen to nobody. Damn fool thing to be doing, rowin’ a damn boat!”

I could almost see Hattie’s blood pressure rising. “What are you so upset about? My mother? You don’t have to be, I set up a trust for her. If anything happened to me, there’s enough in there to keep her, and you—”

“Me?” Suddenly Hattie slapped me, right across the face.

“Hattie, Jeez! What’d you do that for?” I jumped to my feet, more shocked than hurt, but Hattie’s features were contorted with a pain of her own.

“Fool! How can such a smart girl be so damn stupid?! I’m worried about
you
! Not me! Not your momma! You’re the one!”

“Benedetta?” came a voice, agitated, from my mother’s bedroom. “Benedetta!”

“Ma?” I walked past Hattie to my mother’s room, responding on autopilot. I opened the door and the cloying rosewater filled my nose. It was stifling, assaultive. I felt suddenly anxious. Panicky. I hurried to the window and flung it open. The cool night air billowed in the light curtains.

“Close the window!” my mother said. “Close the window!”

“Shhh, it’s staying open. Nobody’s out there. Settle down.” I breathed easier in the fresh air. “Stop worrying. Everything’s okay.”

“Did you do the dishes? Do the dishes, Bennie.”

“The dishes are done.”

“Do the dishes. Do the dishes.”

“They’re all done, Ma. Hattie did them.” I went to her bed and took her hand, which felt weak and warm in mine. I brushed a damp curl from her brow.

“Do the dishes. The dishes are in the sink.”

“Hattie did the dishes. They’re put away. They’re all done. How are you feeling? “

“It’s dark.” She tried to sit up, then flopped back on her pillow. “It’s late. You should go home. Go home. Go home.”

“I am home. Hattie told me you had some soup today. That was good.”

“It’s dark. It’s dark. Do the dishes. Do the dishes. Get me a Kleenex.”

“How are you?” I sat on the ancient bed, which creaked loudly. Another thing she wouldn’t let me replace.

“Get me a Kleenex. I need a Kleenex.”

“You don’t need a Kleenex, forget about the Kleenex. Did you really eat lunch today? Some soup?”

“I need it, I need it. It’s dark.” Her voice rose, thinning out with anxiety. “I need it. I need it. I need it.”

“All right, relax.” I pulled a Kleenex out of the box on her nightstand, and she grabbed it from me, balling it up and squeezing it like a pulsing heart. In a minute she’d be tearing it apart and fingering the pieces, then stuffing the shreds in the pockets of her nightgown. The rest she would hide under the chenille coverlet and in her pillowcase. “Is that better, Ma? You happy, you got your Kleenex?” I couldn’t keep the irritation from my voice. She went through a box of Kleenex a day, even though Hattie bought Family Size. We needed Crazy Family Size.

“Read to me. Read to me. Read to me. It’s dark.”

“Okay, fine.” I dragged a wooden chair over to the bed, kicked off my pumps in the dark, and put my feet into the well of the night-stand.

“Read to me. Read to me. Read to me.”

“Relax. Everything’s okay, Ma. Settle down, and I will.” I didn’t turn on the light or bother with a book, there was no point to that. I simply told her about my day, from top to bottom, every night. I have no idea why I did this, nor did I kid myself I was getting through. I just told it to her as if it were a novel, and she would quiet in time, then doze off. I’d done this every night since she’d gone completely bonkers, which was almost as long as I could remember. Enough Kleenexes ago to reforest the Pacific Northwest.

“Read to me. Read to me. Read to me.” She began to tear at the Kleenex. “Now. Now. Now.”

“Well, today she found out that the man she loved was murdered,” I said, and told the whole story. She muttered throughout, not listening to anything I said, and if the truth be told, I didn’t listen to her either.

It was Hattie I was thinking of.

Later, I stood in the middle of my living room with Bear, listening to Sam’s worried voice on my answering machine. He’d called five times to see how I was, his messages interspersed with the reporters’, but I couldn’t return his calls just yet. I was assessing the damage wrought by Hurricane Azzic.

The apartment was messier than even I liked it. Books had been torn from the shelves and spilled onto the rug. The contents of a drawer had been dumped on the coffee table in front of the TV and the stack of CDs had been rifled. The couch pillows, upended, lay on the floor next to the remote control. At least the cops had managed to find the remote. It must’ve been in the couch. It’s always in the couch.

I stepped through the rubble into the kitchen with Bear at my side. Pots and pans littered the counters. An open box of Müeslix lay on its side and the kitchen drawers hung open. Fingerprint dust covered the counters and cabinet doors. Bear sniffed around, much as the cops had before her. What were they looking for? Mark had never even lived here, he’d always kept his own place. Why did they do this? Because they could.

The worst was the bedroom. I stood in the portal, taking it in. My bedclothes had been stripped and the mattress showed an old menstrual stain the size of a calf’s liver. Christ. I imagined the cops joking over that.

I went to my bureau. My underwear drawer was in total disarray, invaded by unseen hands. The other drawers had been searched, too. Sweaters tumbled with T-shirts; pantyhose and socks were intertwined, half on the floor. Rowing gear had been jettisoned. My photos of Mark were gone, as were his early love notes and Valentine’s Day cards. Even my diaphragm was missing. Terrific. Exhibit A.

I crossed over the debris to the closet, where it was more of the same. Suits had been trashed, even my silk dresses ended up on the floor. My shoes were piled in a mound. It was a nightmare, even for a slob.

I sighed, kicked off my pumps, and padded into the bathroom. A jar of Lancôme moisturizer was open, the costly creme churned up by a grubby finger, and the toothpaste was squeezed out into a turquoise squiggle. The door to the medicine cabinet was ajar; the aspirin and other pills had been uncapped and presumably gone through. I plopped onto the closed toilet seat and slipped the papers out of my jacket pocket; a search warrant, a list of what had been seized, and an affidavit of probable cause. I remembered affidavits as long as these from the old days. Now my name was on the caption.

Bear settled onto the cool tile floor and looked up questioningly, so I read aloud: “‘Letters and correspondence, personal computer and diskettes, office supplies, files of household bills and the like, articles of clothing.’” I assumed this referred to the outfit I was wearing the day Mark was murdered, for fiber samples. Also all the clothes in the hamper, since police like that for evidentiary as well as shock value. Going through your dirty laundry, literally.

The list continued. “‘Shoes and sneakers, overcoats and topcoats, and certain jewelry items as follows,’” and they catalogued every piece of jewelry I had, most of which was my mother’s. They even took her engagement ring, a diamond chip from a man who didn’t stick around for the wedding.