“Your work was important to you,” she says. Nikki’s now making justifications for me.
I leave it alone, let it stand, as a truism.
“What about her?” asks Nikki.
“Who?”
“Ben’s wife-what’s her name-Tricia?”
I pause for an instant, as if I have to search the dark recesses of my memory for the name of some fleeting acquaintance.
“Talia,” I say.
“That’s right, Talia. How’s Talia doing?”
“I haven’t seen her. I don’t know. I suppose she’ll cope.”
“Yes, I suppose,” says Nikki.
I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.
“What will happen with the firm now?” Nikki speaks while she mops the countertop.
“I don’t know. I suppose it will go on.”
“The papers are treating the whole thing with a lot of sensation, Ben’s death and all,” she says. “A lot of speculation.”
“Newspapers always speculate. That’s their job,” I say.
“It could be embarrassing for her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Talia. The suicide, all the controversy, you know. It can’t be pleasant.”
“I suppose.”
“Has she offered to give you any help?”
“What?”
“Talia. Has she offered to help you get back in with the firm?”
I am psychically coldcocked. But I do not stammer. I carry the farce to its conclusion, almost as a reflex. “What makes you think I want to go back to the firm? Why would she want to get involved?”
Nikki turns from the sink and gives me a look, a “what am I, dogshit?” expression. She knows about Talia and me. It’s written in the smirk mat envelops her mouth. I am certain that wonder has crept across my face. It pains me that she may know only half the truth, that she may not know that Talia and I are no longer an item. But I can’t bring myself to say it. The careful shield of discretion that I had erected had been so transparent that Nikki has seen through it, and I am left to wonder, how many others? I stare back for several seconds. She blinks and breaks eye contact. She is bluffing-I think. A deft exercise in female intuition. But I take no chances. I avoid confrontation on the point.
“It’s only natural mat there would be speculation and talk. It’s not every day that a nominee to the United States Supreme Court kills himself. Ben’s death leaves quite a hole in the firm,” I say.
“Yes.” She pauses as if for effect. “That’s what I was talking about,” she says, “filling the hole.” The words are delivered with biting sarcasm.
“Well, we’d better be hitting the road.” I have suddenly lost my desire for meaningful dialogue. “Come on, kiddo.” I scoop Sarah off her feet and balance her on my shoulder.
“Be careful of her.”
“What?” I turn to look at Nikki, waiting for some last-minute motherly admonition. She has dropped the sponge into the sink and now stands staring directly at me.
“Watch yourself. She’s not to be trusted.”
Her words strike like a thunderbolt when I realize that Nikki is talking not about our daughter, but about the woman, whom to my recollection she has met only twice in her life-Talia Potter.
My Saturday-morning sojourns to the park with my daughter do double duty. As she scampers up the ladder and down the slide I do pull-ups on the monkey bars, and push-ups in the sand. It’s a cheap stand-in for my canceled membership at the athletic club, one of many luxuries now gone, the price of contributing to the support of two households. We move through the ritual, twenty minutes on the swings, five or six trips up and down the slide, and then it’s off to the ice cream parlor a dozen blocks away.
I usher Sarah out of the playground and close the Cyclone gate to keep the other little inmates from escaping. As I turn, I see her.
“Damn it.”
Sarah’s wandered off the concrete and is up to her ankles in mud, an adventure spawned by a leaking sprinkler head.
“Your mother’s gonna kill me.” I’m on her, but it’s too late. Her legs and lower torso are a thousand points of mud, courtesy of the hydraulics of two stamping little feet.
“-I told you once, Madriani, a long time ago, a little more light, a little less heat. You’ll live longer.”
It’s a voice from the past, lost in the tangle of a towering fern. I crane my neck. There, behind the plant, I see a ghost seated on a bench; he has a familiar smile, but the face is pale and drawn. Marginally recognizable, Sam Jennings, the man who hired me a dozen years ago to be a prosecutor in this county, looks up at me, a twinkle in his eye.
He rises from the bench.
“Good to see you again, Paul. Yours?” He nods toward Sarah.
“Yes.”
Her condition by now is hopeless. She has smeared the mud on her upper legs with her hands.
“How old?” he asks.
“Three.”
“And a half,” Sarah chimes in, holding up three fingers.
Jennings laughs. He stoops low to look her in the eyes. “I once had little girls just about your age.”
Sarah is all round eyes. “What happened to them?”
“They grew up.”
I’ve missed this man greatly since leaving his fold and joining Potter, Skarpellos. I have on more than one occasion since my ouster from the firm considered calling him, but have thought better of delivering my problems to the doorstep of a sick man. When he called to ask me to attend Danley’s execution in his place, I knew how ill he really was. Sam isn’t the kind to ask people to do something he’s unwilling to do himself.
His skin has the pallor of paraffin. Radiation and the ravages of chemistry have taken their toll. I tower over this man who was once my equal in physical stature. He is stooped and withered like straw following a rainstorm. A condition, I suspect, rendered not so much by the cancer that invades his body as by the clinical horrors that pass for a cure. It is, by all appearances, a losing battle.
Our eyes follow Sarah, whose attention has been caught by a gray squirrel making for one of the trees. Her condition is hopeless. I let her go. I will simply have to absorb Nikki’s tongue-lashing later.
Sam Jennings is, by nature, an affable man. His countenance has all the appearances of a face well stamped from birth with an abiding smile. But there are those who learned too late that this is an aspect of his character that belies an acquired predatory sense. For in his thirty years as chief prosecutor for this county and in the early decades of his tenure, Samuel Jennings, for crimes well deserved, sent a half-dozen men to their final peace in the state’s gas chamber.
“See any of the old crowd?” I ask.
“I suppose that’s one of the benefits of leaving voluntarily instead of getting your ass kicked in an election. You can stop by the office every once in a while. Even so,” he says, “Nelson doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Who knows. Maybe he thinks my being there is going to crimp his management style. Hell, look at me. What’s he think, I’m gonna run against him?”
“Maybe he thinks you might plant the idea elsewhere,” I say. “Maybe with one of his deputies.”
“Who, me?” he says. There’s a lot of feigned innocence here. I can tell that this scenario is not original with me, unless I’ve misread the twinkle in his eye. He’s probably been solicited for an endorsement. I wonder who in the office it is, who will be fingered to step out on the ledge with Nelson on election day, to try to nudge him off. Nelson was appointed to fill the vacancy left when Sam retired. Now he has to earn his spurs in the next election.
“How’s it going with you? The solo practice and all?”
I make a face. “Enjoying it enough. Now ask me if I’m making any money.”
“Money’s not everything.” He smiles.
“This from a man with a fat county pension.”
“You could’ve stayed there. Didn’t have to go chasing the rainbow,” he says.
“Hmm. Not a very happy place right now. Not from what I hear.”