Kill All the Lawyers (2 page)

Steve could still remember his closing argument. He used the trial lawyer's trick of the loaded rhetorical question.

"Is Dr. William Kreeger a stupid man? No, he has a near-genius IQ. Is he a careless man? No, quite the contrary. He's precise and meticulous. So, ask yourselves, if Dr. Kreeger were inclined to kill someone, would he do it at his own home? Would he be present at the time of death? Would he admit to police that he had provided a controlled substance to the victim? I think you know the answers. This was an unfortunate accident, not an act of murder."

The jury returned a compromise verdict: guilty of involuntary manslaughter. Not a bad result, Steve thought—but then, he didn't have to serve the time. Now he dredged up everything he could remember about the moment the jury came back with the verdict. Kreeger didn't even wince. Not one of those clients whose knees buckle and eyes brim with tears.

Kreeger didn't blame Steve. Thanked him, in fact, for doing his best. Kreeger hired another lawyer for the appeal, but nothing unusual there. Appellate work was brief writing. Steve was never much for book work, and footnotes gave him a headache.

He never heard from Kreeger again. Not a call or postcard from prison. And nothing when he got out.

So what's with all the insults now? Why is he calling me a shyster and challenging me to debate him on the air?

Steve didn't like the answer. Only one thing could have changed.

He found out. Somehow, he found out exactly what I did.

Meaning Kreeger also figured out that he would have been acquitted if any other lawyer on the planet had defended the case. And that marlin on the door? It had to be a message from Kreeger, something they both would understand.

A marlin.

Not a grouper or a shark or a moray eel.

A marlin had significance for both of them.

So what's Kreeger want?

Steve tried the loose-thread approach, something his father taught him.
"Whenever you're stumped and feeling dumb as a suck-egg mule,"
Herbert T. Solomon used to drawl,
"grab a loose thread and pull the cotton-picking thing till you find where it leads."
Now Steve pulled at the idea of Kreeger suddenly attacking him on the radio and jamming a rotting fish into his front door. Where did that thread lead?

Probably not to a lawsuit or disbarment proceedings. No challenge for Kreeger's towering ego to seek redress through official channels. No chance to show his obvious superiority. Steve pulled at the thread some more. It kept leading back to a dead woman in a hot tub.

"The bitch betrayed me."

That's what Kreeger had told Steve, even while denying that he'd killed Nancy Lamm. Kreeger's hot eyes notwithstanding, there was an icy coldness to the man that could make you shiver. And now the answer Steve was seeking emerged with chilling clarity.

The bastard doesn't want to sue me. He wants to
kill
me.

Two

THE FACE IN THE WINDOW

Walking down the noisy corridor at school, dodging bigger kids with Mack truck shoulders, Bobby tried to remember the dream.

It was a dream, right?

The face in his bedroom window. He tried to picture the face, but it was lost in the fog of sleep. Dammit, his brain was letting him down. All that stuff in his head, but where was the face?

When I close my eyes, why does all this useless 411 pop up?

In one corner of his brain, floating letters, constantly rearranging themselves into new words. In another corner, the periodic table of elements, 118 of them, from hydrogen to ununoctium.
So where did the face go?

He hadn't told Uncle Steve about the face in the window because it was just a dream.

Or was it?

Bobby decided to put his brain in reverse and logically consider the events of the past twelve hours. The same night someone stuck a giant fish on the front door, he dreamed of a face in the window.

Okay, think! What else do you remember?

A noise! There'd been a noise in the backyard. A palm frond falling, maybe? No, different than that.

Someone bumping into the old windsurfer propped against the house? Maybe. And a second sound. Metallic. The mast clanking against the boom? Could be.

Noise. Face. Fish.

The words flashed in his brain. Just like the warning sign in front of the school.

Slow Children. Slow Children. Slow Children.

Which could be rearranged to spell SIN HELL CROWD.

A raging river of words cascaded through his brain. He could shatter the words with a hammer, the letters scattering then re-forming, an endless scrawl of graffiti. Sometimes Bobby thought he could hear the synapses in his brain, crackling like a power line he once saw in the street after a storm, throwing off sparks, dancing like a thick black snake. Sometimes, listening to the sounds grow louder, watching the letters multiply, he would walk into walls or get lost heading home from the bus stop. When that happened, Uncle Steve would teach him the concentration game. That's how his uncle stole all those bases when he played baseball at U.M. Focusing on the pitcher, studying every twitch, knowing whether he would go to the plate, or try to pick him off first base.

"You're gonna be even better than me at the concentration game, kiddo, because your brain's a Ferrari and mine's an old pickup truck."

But it didn't feel that way. Sometimes Bobby thought there was too much floating around in his head, like Grandpop's stews where he tossed in snapper heads and mackerel tails and called it bouillabaisse.

Bouillabaisse. USE A SLOB ALIBI.

The letters ricocheted inside his skull.

Noise. Face. Fish.

He tried to clear out all the other images and draw a picture of the face in the window. For several moments, nothing. Then . . .

A woman!

What else? Bobby played cop, like on the TV shows. What color hair? How old? Any identifying marks?

She looked familiar.

She looked like Mom!

Only cleaner. Bobby remembered the way his mother had looked on the farm. She was carrying cold soup into the shed where he was locked up. Her face streaked with soot from the fireplace, her eyes watery and far away. Totally zonked on stuff she smoked or inhaled or injected. That night, Uncle Steve broke into the shed to take him away. Lots of images there.

The bearded man with the walking stick.

The man smelled like wet straw and tobacco. Sometimes he slept in Mom's bed, and sometimes, after they yelled and hit each other, he would spend the night on the floor of the shed, farting and cursing. Bobby had watched the man carve the stick from a solid piece of wood. It was as long as a cane, but thicker, with a curved top like a shepherd's staff. The man had polished it and painted it with a shiny varnish.

Whoosh! Ker-thomp!

The sounds from that night. The man had tried to hit Uncle Steve with the staff. But Uncle Steve was very quick and strong, too, stronger than he looked. He wrestled the staff away and swung it like a baseball bat.
Whoosh.
Then,
ker-thomp,
the stick struck the man's head, sounding like a bat hitting a ball. Home run.

Bobby remembered Uncle Steve carrying him through the woods, slipping on wet stones, but never falling. Bobby could feel his uncle's heart beating as he ran. Instead of slowing down, he ran faster, Bobby wondering how anyone could go so fast while carrying another person, even someone as skinny as him.

Ever since that night, Bobby had lived with Uncle Steve. They were best buds. But Bobby couldn't tell him about Mom in the window. Uncle Steve hated Mom, even though she was his sister.

"My worthless sister Janice."

That's what he called her when he didn't think Bobby was listening.

There was another reason to keep quiet, too. It might only have been a dream.

* * *

Bobby spotted Maria kneeling at her locker, her shirt riding up the back of her low-rise jeans, revealing the dainty knobs of her spinal column, like the peaks of a mountain range. He caught a glimpse of her smooth skin, disappearing into the top of her black panties. Black panties. PACK A SIN BELT. Maria was the hottest hottie in the sixth grade. Caramel skin, hair as black as her panties. Eyes as dark as the obsidian rock Bobby handed her in earth science class, their hands touching. Maria Munoz-Goldberg.

Bobby crouched down at his own locker. He wanted to say something, but what?

Maria had taped photos of Hillary Duff and Chad Michael Murray to the inside of her locker. Bobby had seen them in that dipshit movie,
A Cinderella Story,
but maybe slamming Maria's favorite actors wasn't the way to go.

What could he do? Maria lived only a block away on Loquat, 573 steps from his front door. Should he tell her that?

No, she'll think I'm a stalker.

"Hey, Bobby," she said.

"Hey." He turned too quickly and bashed his elbow into his locker door.
Owww!
His funny bone, the pain so intense it momentarily blinded him.

"You read the history junk?" she asked.

He mumbled a "yeah" through the pain.

"The Civil War has too many battles," she complained. "I can't remember them all."

Bobby thought about saying he'd memorized the battles alphabetically from Antietam to Zollicoffer. But that would sound so dorky. "For the quiz, just know Gettysburg and both Bull Runs," he said.

"There's so much to read." A faint whine, but coming from her parted lips, it sounded musical.

Antietam, Bachelor's Creek. Chickamauga, Devil's Backbone, Ezra Church . . .

He couldn't help it. His brain was reciting Civil War battles from A to Z.

"Do you think you could help me?" she asked.

"You mean . . . study together?"

"I could come over to your house after school."

He tossed his shoulders, as if that would be okay, but no big deal. "Sure. Cool. You know where I live?"

She smiled, perfect teeth, the orthodonture having been removed at the beginning of the school year. "I know it's gotta be close. I've seen you outside my house."

Busted!

"I, uh . . . walk . . . sometimes. The neighborhood. Kumquat. Loquat. Avocado . . ."

Shut up already! You sound like a total wingnut.

"My hood, too." She stood up, and so did Bobby, miraculously managing not to drop his books or bang his shins into the locker.

"Give me your address," she said. "I'll come over around four."

Bobby wrote the address on a slip of paper. He knew that some people couldn't remember things the way he could.

"I'll bring some DVDs," Maria said. "If we get done early, maybe we can just hang and watch a movie."

"Great. Have you ever seen
A Cinderella Story
? It's pretty cool."

"Are you kidding! I
love
that movie. I've seen it like a zillion times."

Another smile, and she spun on her heel and headed off, breathing a "See ya later" over her perfect shoulder.

Holy shit.

Maria Munoz-Goldberg was coming to his house with her history book, her DVDs, and her black panties. He watched her walk toward home room, the symphony of her voice still echoing in his brain, along with . . .

Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Harper's Ferry, Irish Bend, Jenkins' Ferry, Kennesaw Mountain . . .

The names wouldn't stop. But they were so soft, he could still hear Maria's voice and could still see her parted lips, warm and sugary in his brain.

Three

GAFF FROM THE PAST

Steve parked the car and admired the twenty-foot-high likeness of himself. It was a part of the day he always enjoyed.

The two-story mural was painted on the chipped stucco wall of Les Mannequins, the modeling agency where Solomon & Lord maintained its offices. There was Steve, sitting on the edge of a desk, wearing a charcoal gray suit, reading a law book. Something he never wore, something he never did. Standing next to him was Victoria, in a ruby red knit suit with a two-button, ruffled-trim jacket, her breasts fuller, her hips rounder than in real life.

Artistic license.

Then the caption, in fancy script:

Solomon & Lord, Attorneys-at-Law

The Wisdom of Solomon, the Strength of the Lord

Call (555) UBE-FREE

Victoria had been appalled, of course. "Cheesy" and "blasphemous" were two of her kinder adjectives. The mural was the handiwork of Henri Touissant, a sixteen-year-old Steve had represented in Juvenile Court. One of the best graffiti artists in Little Haiti, Henri was busted while tagging an overpass with a drawing of President Bush having intimate relations with a goat. "Profound political satire," Steve argued in the lad's defense. The judge gave Henri probation, and Steve hired him to paint the mural, in lieu of attorney's fees.

Now, heading into the building, Steve was plagued by a question that had been bothering him all morning.

Just how much should I tell Victoria?

It was one of the recurring issues of their relationship, both professional and personal. He'd been more open with Victoria than with any other woman he'd ever known. Of course, he'd never cared for any other woman with the depth of feelings he had for her.

But she can be so damn judgmental.

Steve remembered the fireworks in Bobby's guardianship case. Faced with the possibility that the state would take his nephew away, Steve had secretly paid Janice, his drug-addled sister, to change her testimony. When Victoria found out, she exploded.