The Ditto List (39 page)

“How many have we got?”

“Four, is all I could find the day I went out there. She wouldn't give me any names herself, and nobody I talked to was particularly anxious to help.”

“Anything at all from Gardner? Settlement offer or anything?”

“Nope.”

“How about our client? Any word from her?”

“Nothing.”

“You sure it's tomorrow?”

“It's been on the calendar for weeks, D.T. And there's no way you can get a continuance.”

“I know, I know.” D.T. looked at Bobby closely. They hadn't spoken about the matter since that first phone call, the night D.T. had lurked outside the Billings Avenue sex club, waiting in vain for his client's husband to make life easy for him. Suddenly it was the day before trial. If it went badly, if there was a real danger that Mareth Stone would lose her children, he would need to apply some heat. And Bobby E. Lee held the only matches in town.

D.T. cleared his throat. “You know what I need to ask you about, don't you?” he said softly.

Bobby E. Lee nodded. “I was hoping you'd forgotten. When do you need him?”

“I can string out the trial for at least two days. Maybe three, if Gardner puts on all his witnesses. And of course the custody issue may turn out to be a gambit, and we can trade some bucks for the kids and remove it from contention. But I think Gardner may be serious when he says Stone really wants them, so we'll have to fight. If we fight we have to win. I mean, the minute a client like Mareth Stone loses a head-to-head custody fight then that's the last paying customer I'll see in here, Bobby. The Friday Fiasco will be the high point of the week.”

Bobby E. Lee sighed. “I'll make some calls. I should know something by five. But it may take a couple of days.”

“Two at most,” D.T. admonished. “We should have done it a month ago.”

Bobby E. Lee nodded and stood up. Frowning, D.T. watched him leave the office, then uttered a quick prayer for forgiveness, addressed to whom it may concern.

He was about to leave his office when the phone rang. “Mr. Jones?”

“Yes?”

“This is Lucinda Finders. Remember me?”

“Sure I do. How are you? How's the baby?”

Her languid voice gave him the shiver it always did, the hint of defiance and connivance and barely stemmed desire. He had not actually laid eyes on her for months, yet she had materialized before him almost daily, in cinematic visions: wrapped like a prophet on his deck, suckling her babe, licking her wounds, enticing him. She had become his succubus.

“I'm fine and Krystle's fine, too, Mr. Jones. She's just the sweetest thing. Sleeps through the night already and everything. We're just so happy with her.”

“We?”

“Me and Del. I went back with him, remember? And I'm still here.” She tried to sing it, make it carefree and pleasing. But her chuckle died as quickly as it came, leaving nothing but questions in his mind.

“Where are you living?” he asked her.

“Same place. Houston Street.”

“Is Del working?”

“Off and on. Mostly off.”

“How about you?”

“I'm back at the Pancake House. Manager said some customers was asking for me so he decided to hire me back. Gave me a raise and everything. I only work nights, now. Seven to midnight.”

“Who stays with the baby?”

“Del.”

D.T. was silent.

“He's good with her, Mr. Jones. Really, he is.”

“Excuse me if I don't believe you.”

She didn't respond. He was aware and sorry that he'd hurt her, and wondered if there was a way to hurt her enough to make her leave the man for good.

“I hate to be calling like this, Mr. Jones,” she began after a minute, the eagerness of her first words now absent from her voice.

“It's all right. I'm glad you did. I've been wondering about you.”

“What I mean is, I hate to ask you what I got to ask you.”

“What do you have to ask me?”

She paused. “Just hear me out first, okay? Before you get mad?”

“Okay.”

“Well, you know the day I first come to see you? In your office? When I thought I wanted a divorce from Del?”

“Yes.” He knew what was coming, knew she couldn't help it, and knew he couldn't make it easy for her.

“Well, you know that fifty dollars I gave you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Del says since I didn't get me a divorce after all, then I should get that money back. I mean, he's been after me to call you for the longest time, Mr. Jones, and I finally promised him I'd do it. But I just promised I'd ask,” she added quickly. “I know you helped me that night, and wrote up some papers, and you got a right to keep the money, I know that, but I had to ask. I mean, somehow Del just knows whether I've done what I promised to or not, you know, so …”

He sighed. “It's all right, Lucinda. I'll send you the money. Don't worry about it.”

“It's not right, I know that, Mr. Jones. But, well, the hospital's after me to pay for them tests they run on Krystle, and Daddy won't pay the hospital in Reedville for when I had the baby, so we're kind of in a bind right now. Collection agencies calling day and night and all. I mean …”

“Don't worry about it, Lucinda,” he said again. “Really. You'll have the money by Thursday.”

“Well, thanks a whole lot, Mr. Jones.”

“You're welcome.”

“I meet a lot of girls down at the Pancake House, you know, and the next one I hear say she's looking for a good lawyer I'll sure send her down your way.”

He could see them now, fiascos every one, smelling of syrup and burned batter. “You do that, Lucinda,” he said. “Now tell me the truth. Are you sure you're all right?”

“I'm just fine.”

“The baby, too?”

“Yes. I told you.”

“Is Del there now?”

“He's out back working on the Ford. Del's getting better, Mr. Jones. He really is. He don't drink hardly at all no more.”

“That's good, Lucinda. But if he starts up again you get the hell out of there, okay? You and the baby. Don't stay around him if he's drunk.”

He had injured her again, had blurred her dream. Her words were pinched. “I can handle it, Mr. Jones. You think I can't, but I can. I know what I'm doing. It might not be perfect but it's as perfect as it's going to get. For me.”

He made himself leave it, made himself not beg her not to do anything that would make him live forever with the wish that he'd done much more to help her. “You call me if there's a problem, Lucinda. Anything at all.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

She laughed. “Promise.”

“Give Krystle a big kiss for me.”

“I will.”

D.T. hung up and went to the outer office and asked Bobby E. Lee if there was fifty dollars in the office account. When Bobby nodded his head D.T. told him to send a check to Lucinda and write it off the books as a refunded retainer. Then he returned to his desk and picked up the phone.

“Oswald? D. T. Jones.”

“Ah.” The utterance was Oswald's usual wheeze, as though someone were, finally, strangling him.

“I'm calling about that malpractice case you're bringing against me, Oswald.”

“What about it?”

“It would have been nice to give me a chance to settle the thing before you took it to court.”

“I don't pay the rent by being nice, Jones.”

“And it would have been even nicer if you'd just moved to amend the original divorce decree to get more out of the husband rather than coming after me for malpractice.”

“The husband's a deadbeat. Why don't you just let your carrier handle it, Jones? I work with that outfit all the time on cases like this.”

“I don't
want
my carrier to handle it, Oswald.
I
want to handle it.”

“Yeah? So I'm listening.”

D.T. paused, listened to Oswald's harmonic bellows. “Five grand,” D.T. said at last. “A week from today. You dismiss with prejudice, and that's the end of it.”

“Crap,” Oswald Blacker said.

“Crap? No, not crap, Oswald. That's the way it's going to be.”

“Or what?”

“Or I suggest to a client of mine who's about to shed husband number two that she has quite a nice case against
you
for the way you handled her divorce from husband number one.”

“Yeah? How?”

“The final decree was entered exactly nine years and eleven months after the wedding day.”

“So?”

“So if you'd waited another month before filing the decree the woman's Social Security insurance benefit would have been maximized because she'd been married ten years. Forty-two U.S.C. four-oh-four. You can look it up.”

“Yeah? Big fucking deal. The five grand is out, Jones. I start discovery tomorrow.”

“Remember a woman named Darcel McGee, Oswald?”

“Who?”

“Darcel McGee. As in Fibber.”

“Don't know the woman.”

“Oh, you know her, Oswald. Not as well as you wanted to, but you know her.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“She's the one you tried to rape. Right on your office floor. When your secretary was out to lunch. She's the one who slapped your face and ran out into the street to keep you from pawing her.”

“Bullshit. That's libel, Jones.”

“Not yet, it isn't. It'll be libel when Ms. McGee and I take the story to the papers. Luckily, we have a complete defense.”

“What?”

“Truth.”

“Like hell.”

“Okay, Oswald. See you at the ethics committee. The way I hear it, Ms. McGee isn't the only one you've played caveman with over the years. Should be an interesting session, on top of all the other charges that have been brought against you.”

Oswald Blacker seemed to forget to breathe. “Okay, okay. Maybe I was a little hasty getting the malpractice thing on file. But you screwed up, Jones. The woman has a case.”

“I know I screwed up, Oswald. That's why I'm settling for five grand.”

“But that's not enough.”

“Oh, I think it is, all things considered. I can make a damned good argument that I turned out to be right in that case, screw-up and all. Check out
Jones
v.
Stevenson
if you don't believe me. That's a different Jones, by the way. But if you still think it isn't enough, you make up the difference out of your pocket, Oswald.”

“You must be crazy.”

“Nope. Just pissed off.”

“I won't—”

“I want to end it right here, Oswald; I want the case out of my life. It's your last chance. If I have to go to my carrier and you drag the thing through court, believe me, I'm going to take you down with me.”

“I—”

“Believe me, Oswald.”

“Okay, okay. Cash?”

“Cash.”

“Next week?”

“Right.”

“Okay.”

“Bye, Oswald.”

D.T. hung up, hoping Oswald Blacker wouldn't check his files for the nonexistent Darcel McGee, hoping the stories he had heard were true, that there were so many Darcel McGees in Oswald's practice that specific names had become irrelevant. He grabbed his briefcase, made sure it was empty, then left the office and drove onto the freeway that would take him to the heart of downtown.

He hadn't been in the center of the city for months, hadn't inhaled its fumes or shivered in its shadows since the evening Barbara had made him take her to a poetry reading by a coven of militant feminists, a reading at which he quickly became aware that his solitary male presence had been an affront to every other listener in the room, so much so that one of them, in fact, had publicly asked him to leave. He had left his defense to Barbara, and she had eventually prevailed, though not without embarrassing both him and his accuser, with the result that he had been able to hear men called rapists, butchers, and assassins and women encouraged to become castrators and celibates, in various metres and metaphorical flights, for two hours and thirty-seven minutes. Now he simply sought a parking lot three levels beneath the tallest building in the city. Getting there made him feel like a mole, meek and sightless and leery of what might be going on above him.

It was noon, and the streets crawled with the deductibly hungry, the compulsively slim, the financially preposterous. The swirl of elegance and purpose made his blazer and gray flannels feel more like Big Smiths. He was out of his element and knew it, and he was scared by what he was about to do.

D.T. hurried across the marble floor of the lobby, past the security guard station and the revolving metal sculpture, and consulted the building directory. Bronwin, Kilt and Loftis, Attorneys, was listed on the thirtieth floor. Jerome Fitzgerald was listed on thirty-two. D.T. got in the elevator and punched the button for twenty-nine.

He shared the cage with a kid from a messenger service who wore gray coveralls and Converse hightops and had a Walkman in his ear, a padded envelope in his pocket, and dreadlocks in his hair. His eyes were closed and his fingers snapped to whatever came through the Walkman. His fingernails were the length of witches'. When D.T. left the elevator the kid didn't see or hear him go.

He knew immediately that he had made a mistake. Floor twenty-nine was too decorated, too plush, too public. There was a reception desk and a waiting area, and the floor he was looking for would have neither, only a bright bare hallway, and closed doors with little black and white signs on them, and people scurrying to and fro as though their lives depended on it. Luckily, the receptionist had her back to him, talking into the phone while whirling her Rolodex. D.T. punched the down button and got back on the elevator and descended to twenty-eight amid another box of lunchers.

This was it, if it was anywhere he could get to, the bowels of the law firm—Xerox room, storage rooms, microfilm room, computer room, supply room, and the room he wanted—the room of current files. He suddenly remembered he had been there once before, years earlier, on one of his first cases, during which he had been stuck away in a musty storeroom for six days, paging through ancient passbooks and account ledgers and check stubs and the like, tracing the marital and separate assets of a man who over the previous fifty years had been married three times and made four fortunes and lost three and a half of them. Eventually, D.T. had been able to prove that the man's record-keeping was so sloppy and his ignorance of marital property law so pervasive that all his separate property had disappeared by virtue of the process of commingling and the various legal presumptions that favored marital rather than separate funds when strict records had not been kept. His client, a former manicurist, now called Maui home.