1) Work—
a. Clothes and makeup
b. Call Slough
c. Check Lexis cites in asphalt brief
2) Nikki’s ashes
3) Duran—?
4)
She sat there for a moment, tapping her pencil against the page while Duran watched MTV Finally, she decided there wasn’t any number four. There might be d-e-f-g under Work, but there definitely wasn’t a number four. There was just her job, her sister’s ashes waiting to be scattered, and Duran—who was a whole alphabet in his own right.
“What’s ‘Slough’?” Duran asked, coming to her side and peering at the list.
“My law firm,” she replied. “Now be quiet. I’m thinking.” The fingers of her left hand waggled in the air. Under Duran, she wrote:
a) background—poly
b) patient notes
c) computer
d) patients—#
“I passed the ‘poly,’“ he told her, trying to be helpful, and secretly pleased to find himself so prominently on her to-do list. She looked up at him, and nodded.
“That’s right,” she said. “You did. I wonder how.”
“There wasn’t any mystery to it,” he replied. “I just told the truth.”
“But you didn’t. You’re not Jeffrey Duran—even you know that. You’ve been to the cemetery yourself.”
“Right,” Duran said. “That’s true, but… I have a theory about that.”
“Really?” Adrienne asked. “I’d love to hear it.”
“Okay,” he said, sitting down on the side of the bed. “It’s like this: my parents gave me the name. It’s the one I grew up with. And ‘Duran’ was their name, too. So, if that name was stolen—if it was taken off a grave stone, or something—my parents must have been the ones who did it.”
Adrienne frowned, thinking about it. Finally, she asked, “And why would they have done that?”
“I’m just guessing,” Duran replied. “But maybe they were fugitives.” When Adrienne scoffed at the idea, he began to elaborate: “There was a lot of antiwar violence at the time—maybe they were a part of it. Maybe they were Weathermen, or something.”
Adrienne didn’t say anything for a while, and then: “That’s your theory?”
Duran shrugged. “Yeah.”
“And what about the schools you say you went to—Brown and Wisconsin?”
“What about them?”
“They never heard of you!” Adrienne insisted, sitting back and tossing her pencil aside.
“That’s just a computer glitch,” Duran told her. “I’m on the alumni list at both schools. I get mail from them every month. Either they’re looking for contributions or they want me to buy T-shirts with Bucky or the Bear on them. It’s just my transcripts that are missing.”
“And how do you explain that?”
“I don’t know, maybe I’ve got library fines. It’s just one of those administrative things. But the point is: I know where I went to school. And I’ve written to Brown, and I’ve written to Wisconsin, and I’ve asked them clarify things. So I’m guessing there’s an apology in the mail from each of them. And when I get it, I’ll fax it to you. That’s a promise.”
“Well, it’s an interesting theory—”
Duran laughed. “I just went to my reunion!”
“What do you mean?”
“Sidwell Friends. It’s a private school—”
“I know what ‘Sidwell’ is.”
“Well, that’s me. I’m a Quaker.”
Adrienne eyed him warily. “And what was that like?”
“What was it ‘like’? It was like a reunion. What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been to one.”
“Well, it was great!” Duran enthused. “I saw everyone.”
“Like who?”
“Bunny Kaufman,” he replied, unhesitatingly. “Adam Bowman.”
“These were friends of yours?”
He hesitated for a fraction of a second, then said, “Yeah!”
She looked doubtful.
“Well, ‘friends,’“ he repeated. “Mostly they were people you said hello to in the hallway—though not Adam. We were on the basketball team together.”
“And they recognized you?”
Duran nodded. “Yeah… they seemed to.”
She looked bemused. “‘Seemed to’?”
A heavy sigh from Duran. “Actually, I don’t think they knew me from a bale of hay.”
Adrienne’s eyes widened, and she smiled. “Well, that was honest.”
The look on Duran’s face was one of loss and confusion. “There’s something going on with me,” he admitted. “I know that. I just don’t know what it is.”
She was surprised by his candor, or what seemed like candor. But as she knew from one or two of the pro bono work cases that she’d handled, sociopaths could be brilliant manipulators. And maybe, she thought, that’s how she should look at Duran: as a potentially dangerous client whose innocence was very much in doubt.
“I’d like to believe you,” she told him, “but there are so many things that don’t add up.”
“Like what?”
She glanced at her notepad. “Your patient notes.”
“What about them?”
“There weren’t any.”
Duran shook his head. “I think that was just a misunderstanding.”
“‘A misunderstanding’? There wasn’t anything to misunderstand. There was a photograph. And that was it.”
“I know, but… When you think of it, everything was pretty confusing. I mean, your friend was acting like Dirty Harry, and—most of the file was probably sitting on my desk. I must have been working on it when you got there.”
Adrienne gave him a skeptical look.
“We can check,” Duran suggested. “We can go back there—not tonight but… sometime. And there’s my computer. Most of the time, I wrote my notes in Word. So all of that’s there and—I guess you could subpoena the tapes.”
“What tapes?”
“Your sister and I met twice a week,” Duran explained. “All of our sessions were taped—for the insurance company.”
“Which one?”
“Mutual General Assurance. They’re in New York.” He paused, and opened a can of Coke. “Now you tell me something,” he said.
Adrienne gave him a puzzled look. “Like what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
She thought about it for a moment, and said, “Well… Nikki had a gun.”
Duran looked surprised. “What kind of gun?”
“A rifle.”
It was Duran’s turn to look puzzled. “Why would she have a rifle?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe it was an antique,” Duran suggested.
Adrienne shook her head. “It was new. It had a telescopic lens. And a silencer.”
“Get out!”
“I’m serious!” she insisted.
Duran turned pensive.
“What are you thinking?” Adrienne asked.
“I was thinking… Nico suffered from a dissociative disorder, broug on by post-traumatic stress.”
“So?” Adrienne’s eyes flashed with suspicion. She knew where this was likely to lead—and it was bullshit.
“So… maybe she was thinking about revenge.”
“For what?” Adrienne asked, her voice turning hard.
“What was done to her.”
“And what was that?”
“I know you don’t like to hear it, but I think your sister was the victim of systematic and long-standing sexual abuse—”
“Ohhh—”
“—at the hands of her foster parents.”
“Bull!”
“It’s not ‘bull.’ And your reaction is typical. One sibling is ready to confront the abuse, the other insists that everything’s fine. One accuses; the other defends.”
“It didn’t happen. I mean, think about it—it’s ridiculous. People with hoods!”
Duran shrugged. “Your sister presented a lot of detail and although it went on for years—you were a lot younger. Sometimes, the younger victims don’t understand that what happened to them was sexual abuse. Or even sexual in nature. So you could remember it, and not have the vocabulary to understand it in the same way Nico did.”
Adrienne just shook her head. “You’re in Candyland, Doc!”