Swan Dive - Jeremiah Healy (3 page)

"Meaning, don’t make the other side mad in the
short run by having court orders against him?"

"Right."

"And try to settle out of court first."

"Yeah. Well, kinda. See, if we can negotiate a
fair settlement out of court, then we can put all the kinds of things
I’d want the judge to order in our written agreement, and then we
just pass it by the court at the final hearing."

“
So everything looks like a consensus, not a
command?"

Chris beamed. "Couldn’t have put it better
myself."

"Okay, let me get this straight. You’re afraid
of Marsh, but you don’t want to tick him off by going to court
first. So you want me to do exactly what?"

"Come with me, with Hanna and me, to the
settlement conference over to Roy’s lawyer."

"And do what?"

"Nothing. Just sit there."

"Chris, you want a bodyguard."

He winced. "I wouldn’t call it that."

"I would. Why don’t you hire an off-duty cop?"

"Because the coupla guys I know on the Peabody
force would be out of their jurisdiction in Marblehead. And I don’t
know anybody on their force."

"Then why not have the settlement conference
here?"

Chris slouched back in his chair, placing his palms
behind his head and grinning. "Because, as a negotiating tactic,
I let her persuade me to have it in Marblehead."

"Hanna?"

"No, no. Felicia Arnold. She’s Roy’s
attorney. Heard of her?"

"No."

Chris closed his eyes and spoke blissfully. "She’s
big-time, John. Used to do a lot of criminal defense work, then got
religion and does world-class divorce stuff. It proves that this guy
Marsh is the real thing, financially speaking."

I thought about Chris and how much this case probably
meant to him and Eleni, "financially speaking." I thought
about how I had lost Beth, a day at a time over months, while Chris
was losing Eleni, a day at a time over years. I had agreed to do
dumber things for worse reasons.

"Okay, I’m in."

Chris came forward, wringing his hands like a big
winner about to rake in a poker pot.

"Great, great."

“
Are we meeting Hanna there?"

"Naw, her car’s on the fritz, so I picked her
up this morning. She and the kid are with Eleni. In the kitchen.
C’mon."

As Chris grabbed his coat off the hook behind the
door, I said, "By the way, what does this marauder do for a
living?"

Chris balked. "Marsh?"

"Yeah, Marsh."

Chris turned away and
began walking. "He sells insurance."

* * *

She looked worse than I could have imagined. A Hanna
Marsh stood up when Chris and I entered the kitchen. She rose a good
inch taller than Chris, even in flat shoes. A sturdy figure that
childbearing had made a little fleshy. She wore her platinum hair
short enough to show dark roots if there had been any. A blond girl
clutched the woman’s right leg at the knee with both arms, causing
Hanna’s simple blue wool dress to bunch up. The child first buried
her face in Hanna’s thigh, then looked up at me bright-eyed and
said, "My name’s Vickie, and this is my mother."

I tried to manage a convincing smile at both of them,
but Eleni’s appearance had shocked me. A doctor friend once told me
that multiple sclerosis waxes and wanes. For Eleni, it looked like
straight-line deterioration.

I recalled her first with a cane, then metallic polio
braces. Now the MS had shoved her into a wheelchair. The hands and
arms looked normal, but whatever was left of her legs was hidden in
folds of a long black skirt, and there was an intermittent twitch in
one of the muscles in her left cheek, creating the bizarre impression
of a woman caricaturing a flirtatious come-on. The hair had grayed
unevenly and seemed dried and pulled. Had you seen her from the neck
up, and without the twitch, you might have called her a striking
woman of sixty. If I had my dates right, she’d just turned thirty.

I looked for traces of the laughing, dancing woman of
eighteen that Chris had introduced as his "arranged"
fiancee. A black-haired, green-eyed immigrant whose independence
wasn’t much tempered by an almost complete inability to speak
English. She’d come to America to avoid the restrictions of the old
ways on what women could do and what men could do to them, but the
disease had bowed her in a way that millennia of tradition hadn’t.

“
John," said Eleni.

I leaned over and took her hand, kissing her lightly
on the cheek. "Thank you," she whispered into my ear.

Chris said, "Although it’s pretty obvious, I
guess, John Cuddy, Hanna Marsh."

"And me," said Vickie.

"And you," I said, looking down at Vickie
as I shook Hanna’s hand. It was dry, but trembling.

“
Mr. Cuddy," said Hanna, her voice husky and
catching, "I am sorry, but I want to thank you for coming with
us today."

“
Mrs. Marsh . . ."

"Hey," said Chris, “what’s with this
Mr. and Mrs., huh? It’s John and Hanna, right?"

"And Vickie," I said, beating the child to
it by just a bit, which seemed to please her.

"Where are we going, anyway?" said Vickie.

"Not you," said Eleni, gracefully, "You
and me stay here and make the files. Remember?"

"Oh, right," said Vickie. She looked up and
beckoned me to squat down to her level. "John, when you and
Mommie get back, I want you to meet Cottontail."

"Cottontail?"

"Yes, she’s my little kitty and she’d like
to play with you."

“
She would, huh?"

"Uh-huh."

"Well, we’ll see if we have time afterwards.
Okay?"

Vickie was crestfallen. "That’s what my daddy
always says. ‘We’ll see’."

Chris said, "Hey, let’s get rolling here."
He moved to Eleni and bent down as if to kiss her, but I don’t
think they made actual physical contact. "We’ll probably be
there awhile, so be sure to give her lunch, huh?"

"Don’t worry about us. Me and Vickie gonna be
office people together. Right, Vickie?"

"Right."

Making the files and office people together. As
Chris, Hanna, and I walked out to his car, I wondered whether the
temp-being-late line was the only white lie he’d fed me.
 

THREE
-•-

We drove east on Route 114, through the city of
Salem, where witches were tried and bumed, and past the state
college. I rode in the backseat, listening to Chris and Hanna in the
front. He was shooting disconnected questions rapidly; she was
answering them as best she could. Based on what I knew about
lawyer-client relations, most of the financial, custody, and even
more personal topics Chris asked about should have been covered much
earlier and without a third party like me present.

Chris had scrawled some directions to Felicia
Arnold’s office on a yellow legal pad, but once in downtown
Marblehead itself, we got lost anyway. As Chris inched through the
traffic patterns, the scenes out the windows supported my memories of
Marblehead. One-way streets and narrow alleys, flanked by huge
clapboard houses on postage-stamp lots.

Once the home port of ship captains, the town was now
headquarters for at least three distinct populations. One was the
old-towners, enjoying substantial ancestral money and spectacular
homes across the sheltered harbor on a spit of land called Marblehead
Neck. The second group consisted of established, blue-collar families
involved in commercial fishing or boat servicing. New-towners
comprised the third population, mostly professionals who worked in
Boston but had tired of city life and come to Marblehead to enjoy the
sights and smells of a suburb on the sea. Word had it that some folks
had done very well in the import business, specializing in a certain
brown-green, vegetablelike substitute for tobacco.

Chris finally found Arnold’s address, a beautifully
restored two-story mansion on a high hill overlooking the harbor.
Outside the car, the sea breeze lifted the A high, metallic singsong
of the masts and stays of thousands of pleasure sailers moored below
us. At an average length of twenty-four feet and an average cost of
$15,000, there was probably more seaworthiness there than we lost at
Pearl Harbor.

A receptionist greeted us inside the heavy
brass-knockered front door and led us upstairs. I was last in line,
and as I reached the top of the steps, I saw off in a desk area to my
right a svelte woman, fortyish with auburn hair clipped in a
not-quite-punk style. She arched an eyebrow and smiled at me. A
younger, lawyerlike man with tinted eyeglasses and a beard appeared
beside her. She said something to him out of the side of her mouth
while she watched me. I had the distinct feeling of being inspected
and assessed as her smile became a smirk. The young man glared at me
and turned away from her.

"Sir?" said the receptionist at my left.

"Yes?"

"The conference room is this way."

"Yes, thank you."

She showed me into a lushly carpeted arena with a
glass-walled vista of sails so bright I had to squint. Chris and
Hanna were already seated. Chris had both hands in his battered
briefcase, coaxing a slim file past a bulging one. Hanna fidgeted
next to him.

The receptionist said, "Ms. Arnold will be with
you shortly" and closed the door.

Chris slapped a form in front of Hanna that had a
slew of dollar figures in pencil, some of them with question marks
and others crossed out and rewritten.

"This is your financial statement."

Hanna’s mind took a moment to click in. "I’m
sorry, what?"

“
Your financial statement. Weekly expenses and
stuff you need like we talked about on the phone. It’s just a
draft, but we’ll be using it today and you gotta make sure it’s
accurate."

Chris turned back to his file, madly flipping through
it for something. Any fool could see that Hanna, who spent all of
five seconds on the financial statement, was in no shape to verify
anything, especially without her checkbook and bills for comparison.
I also couldn’t believe that Chris intended to show an opponent the
uncertainties the hand-scratched form suggested about Hanna’s, and
Vickie’s, needs.

There was a polite tap at the door, and my
inspector/assessor came in. Up close, she seemed nearer to fifty and
as carefully restored as her offices, with taut facial features, a
glowing tan, and flattering highlights in the auburn hair that I
somehow didn’t think came from the sun. She smiled at all of us,
lingering on me before saying, "Hello, Chris. And you must be
Hanna. I’m Felicia Arnold."

Arnold extended her hand, with long, lacquered nails,
to Hanna, who shook, both figuratively and literally. Arnold turned
to me and said, “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?"

I stood and said, "John Cuddy. I’m—"

"He’s my new associate," Chris blurted.

I tried to keep the anger off my face as Arnold took
my hand, then drew a nail along my palm as she released it, saying,
"I’ll have to follow your recruitment technique more closely,
Chris. I hadn’t realized you were expanding?

He said, "It was kinda sudden."

Before I could think of an acceptable way to tell the
truth, Arnold swung her head around to bring everyone into the
conversation. "I’m afraid I’ve just had a call from Mr.
Marsh. He’s been delayed and won’t be here for approximately
forty-five minutes."

Chris said, "Jeez, Felicia, I told you when we
set this up that I’d be pressed if we ran late. I got this closing
up in Lowell . . ."

Arnold acted heartbroken. "Yes, Chris, I know.
And I reminded Mr. Marsh of that and he promised to be just as quick
as he could be. But I really am reluctant to start anything
substantive without his being present. So . . ." She opened the
door and backed through it."

". . I’m going to try to get some other work
done. Please feel free to use the library. Just buzz live on the
intraoffice phone if you’d like coffee."

After the door closed, Hanna said, very quietly, "I
told you this would happen."

"Now, Hanna, I’m sure . . ."

I said, "What do you mean?"

Hanna looked up at me, her gray eyes hard and sad at
the same time. "This is Roy’s way. To hold everybody up so he
can be the center, the control of everything."

"Well, at least this way you and Chris have more
time to prepare. I’ll be in the library so you two can talk
confidentially."

I was scanning the library shelves for anything
remotely interesting to read when I heard Arnold’s voice behind me.
"John, could I have a word with you? In my office?"

By the time I had turned around, she was already
walking away from me with that long, vibrating strut of a leggy woman
in high heels. I felt like a fourth-grader being summoned by the
principal.