She wore a sleeveless cropped tee and low-slung tattered jeans and had a cream-of-caramel complexion. Her neck seemed to be connected to her shoulders with thick steel cables, and her shoulders rippled with muscles. Her eyebrows had been plucked into diagonal slashes, one pierced by three metal studs, and she had a crown of curly, reddish-brown hair.
“Maldito!” the woman exhaled as she lowered the bar. “Who's gonna spot me?” Her accent was pure Little Havana.
Bobby hustled over to her. “Me, Cece.”
“Gracias, brainiac.”
Bobby kept his hands on the bar as the woman did two more reps, then, with a grunt, eased the bar down into its brackets. Still on her back, Cece looked up at Victoria and said: “El Jefe's got no manners. I'm Cecilia Santiago.”
“My personal assistant,” Steve said.
“Personal slave is more like it. You that persecutor?”
“Ex-persecutor,” she said. “Victoria Lord. Hello, Cecilia.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“Hey, Cece,” Steve said, “when you're done working on your pecs, could you schedule a press conference on the Barksdale case?”
“Is that ethical?” Victoria asked.
“Would F. Lee Bailey ask that question?”
“Probably not. He's been disbarred.”
Cece vaulted to her feet. A printed message was visible on her cropped tee: “All Men Are Animals. Some Just Make Better Pets.” She had a second tattoo, a green sailfish, which seemed to burst from the top of her low-slung jeans and leap over her navel. “Yo, Lord. King Solomon tell you anything about me?”
“Not in any detail,” Victoria replied, diplomatically.
“What I done was no big deal. Sort of like choplifting.”
“Right,” Steve said. “You choplifted Enrique's Toyota.”
“My boyfriend. He was screwing my cousin, Lourdes, behind my back. So I borrowed his car.”
“You beat him up, then you drove his car off the boat ramp at Matheson Hammock.”
“Not gonna 'criminate myself.” Cece looked at Victoria with suspicion. “So now I gotta slave for two of you?”
“I'm sure we'll all get along fine,” Victoria said, not believing it for a moment.
Cece ran her bloodred fingernails over her abs, contracted and relaxed the muscles. The sailfish wagged its tail. “Look, Lord, I don't make coffee. I don't take your Needless Markup designer shit to the cleaners, and I don't type. We cool?”
“Cece types,” Steve contributed. “She just can't spell.”
“It's my lexus,” Gina said. “You fire me, I'll sue your ass off.”
“You don't have dyslexia. You're just too lazy to use the spell check.”
“Hey, Lord, hear that? He's saying Hispanics are lazy. I'm calling the EEOC.”
“And I'm calling your probation officer,” Steve said.
Victoria watched in amazement. She'd never seen such a lack of professionalism. How could she work in a place like this?
Cece laughed. “Good one, jefe.”
“You, too, Cece.”
They exchanged high fives, then bumped chests, like football players celebrating a touchdown.
Okay, so this was their routine, Victoria thought. First they trade barbs, then display affection. So now there were four people who seemed to care for Solomon. There was that old couple, Marvin and Teresa, who followed him around the courthouse; there was sweet, needy Bobby; and now this felonious, steroid-juiced secretary. What was his appeal, anyway?
Am I missing something? Or am I just too normal to belong to the Steve Solomon Fan Club?
“Okay, everyone to the inner sanctum,” Steve said. “Let's talk about how to win a murder trial.”
As Steve led his crew through a door into his private office, Victoria was aware of two sensations: the smell of rotten vegetables and what sounded like metal garbage cans banging against each other. Just below the grimy window, in a narrow alley, was a green Dumpster, horseflies buzzing around its open lid. Across the alley was a three-story apartment building, and on the nearest balcony, five bare-chested men beat sticks against metal pans and what looked like fifty-five-gallon oil drums.
“Trinidad steel band,” Steve said.
“That's reassuring,” she said. “I thought it was a prison riot.”
To escape the stench and the percussion, Victoria moved toward a corner of the room where a bubbling fish tank housed half a dozen rust-colored crustaceans. “Let me guess. You poach lobsters in your spare time.”
“You think too small.”
“His client hijacks refrigerated trucks coming up from the Keys,” Cece said.
Victoria scoped out the rest of the place. On one wall was a framed cartoon of a courtroom filled with water. The fins of two sharks were visible, cutting smoothly through the water, headed toward the judge. The caption read: “Counsel Approaching the Bench.”
Sure, Solomon would relate to that.
Victoria was in purgatory. What had happened to her master plan? Five years of public service parlayed into a job in a prestigious firm, all leading to partnership and lifetime tenure. Or maybe a judgeship.
Judge Lord.
But here she was, inhaling the fumes from a Dumpster, her plans dashed, her career in shambles.
Looking at the cracked and soiled plaster walls, feeling a mixture of anger and regret, Victoria said: “For a hotshot lawyer, Solomon, your office is…” How could she put this delicately? “A real shit hole.”
So there it was, Steve thought. Being compared to the deep-carpet types downtown. Being compared to Bigby, too, he supposed, with all that inherited money. What were her values, anyway? If wealth and status were her turn-ons, maybe it was better that she was taken.
“That stuff important to you, Victoria? Marble on the floor, mahogany on the walls?”
“For better or worse, that's how we measure success.”
“Success should never be confused with excellence.”
“Here we go again,” Cece said. “He always uses this shit to explain why my paycheck's late.”
Steve walked to the lobster tank, picked up a stale bagel from a dish, crumbled it, and dropped the pieces into the water. He watched the crustaceans crawl over each other, like fans after a Barry Bonds home run. “Success is how other people judge you,” he said. “Are you driving that Ferrari, buying that house in Aspen? Excellence can't be measured in dollars. Ideals don't fit into a bank account. It's about judging yourself. Have you lived up to your principles or have you sold out?”
“You have principles?” Victoria asked.
“I make up my own.”
“Solomon's Laws,” Cece said. “Every time he gets a bright idea, I gotta write it down for posteridad.”
“Write this down, Cece. ‘I will never compromise my ideals to achieve someone else's definition of success.'”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it.”
“Sounds like you're making excuses for not earning enough money to buy a decent car and clean the carpets,” Victoria said.
“He could make a shitload,” Cece said, “if he wasn't the santo patron of lost cases. You got a lousy case and no money, come on down. Haitian refugees want green cards, Miccosukees want their burial ground, migrant workers want fair pay. We take 'em all.”
“I didn't know you did pro bono work,” Victoria said.
Steve shrugged. “I do my share.”
“And everybody else's,” Cece said. “I don't let him advertise it, or every deadbeat in town would be in our waiting room.”
“Solomon, you are full of surprises,” Victoria said.
“Don't make a big deal out of it,” he said.
“No, I mean it. I'm sorry.”
“Yo, jefe,” Cece said. “We gonna talk about the case or what? I gotta do my speed reps.”
Steve sat on the edge of his desk. “Let's start with Charles Barksdale. Victoria, paint us a picture.”
She took a breath. “He had a lot of interests,” she began. “Art, literature, poetry. He was proud of his first editions. He was extremely well read. And he let everybody know it.”