The Ditto List (8 page)

Bobby E. Lee shook his head. “I didn't say they were for
her
” he said.

FOUR

After Lucinda Finders had disappeared down the long dark hall outside his office, D.T. returned to his desk and leaned back in his chair and put his heels on the file folder closest to the corner. Her fertility fixed in his mind, her history fresh in his gut, D.T. tried to imagine what the future would hold for her and the baby. Impoverished, unskilled, alone. The world, not kind to such, demanded fealty a proud person like Lucinda would refuse to pay. She reminded him of the statement he often made when drunk and holding forth—that the single greatest gift to mankind would be an inoculation against fecundity, effective for precisely twenty-five years, to be administered to all babies at birth, regardless of race or creed or color. Lucinda also reminded him of a statistic that haunted him: one-third of all murdered women are murdered by their mates.

Bobby E. Lee would call Lucinda an Atomic Lover—one of those women who do everything right in a marriage yet still get burned, who love too hard, overlook too much, undertake a too-extensive rehabilitation of their mate, and in return receive brief minutes of pleasure isolated between long days of abuse and neglect. It loaded their men with guilt, that worshipful endurance, and the men often beat them bloody to evade or somehow to deserve it. Psychology 101. Bobby E. Lee thought Atomic Lovers were the saddest people on earth. And Bobby E. Lee claimed to be one of them himself.

D.T. picked up the telephone and dialed his bookie Sol. Mama's Buns had come from twelve lengths back to win at eight-to-one, which put D.T. almost a thousand to the good. He hoped Walter had followed his tip. Still, he was five hundred down for the month, many thousand down for the year. He should quit gambling. It had cost him a quarter of his income over the years, had provoked at least one IRS audit and, after a particularly persistent streak of ill fortune, a telephone call from Las Vegas that could only be termed terrifying. But he wouldn't quit, he knew, not as long as he had an income and a bookie, because gambling was his one indulgence that yielded a quick and certain judgment. When he won at trial the victory, though always sweet, always had its price—delay, expense, anguish, the unseemly if not illegal gambits that litigation so often required of him. So despite his losses he craved the wager more and more, its purity, its definition, its lack of nuance, its rush. He shrugged and replaced the phone and flipped through the latest issue of
Flannery's Football
for an early look at the NFL.

A minute later the intercom buzzed and Bobby E. Lee announced his final appointment. “It isn't a ditto, is it?” D.T. asked. “I don't want any more dittos this afternoon.”

“Non-usual,” Bobby E. Lee said simply.

“But what?”

“Who knows? She looks like a cheerleader. Maybe someone stole her pompons.”

It was far too late in a far too depressing day to stage his usual charade of sedulity. Instead, he tossed aside the football book, dropped his heels to the floor, and went straight to the waiting room.

“This is Miss Rita Holloway, Mr. Jones,” Bobby E. Lee announced, emphasizing the title. “Your final appointment for the day. I'll be leaving now,” Bobby E. Lee added quickly. “Have a nice weekend.”

“You, too,” D.T. said, then remembered the diamond in the lunch companion's nostril, then envisioned the two men about to couple, then stopped himself.

When he turned toward the couch he saw a small woman looking at him eagerly from behind the undisturbed row of periodicals. She was short and dark and wore grey slacks, white sandals, and a yellow knit top that billowed around her shoulders. Her smile exposed a perfect row of teeth. Her skin was the color of the leather purse that lay beside her; her hair was a fixed swirl of black meringue. Her quick black eyes made D.T. feel like a somewhat loathsome specimen.

When she had learned all she could from a glance the woman crossed the room and stuck out a hand so small it seemed a technological triumph of Oriental origin. “I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones,” she said easily, the words crisp, the gesture accomplished. D.T. swallowed her hand in his and she squeezed with surprising strength.

D.T. was immediately on edge. He was used to serving the distraught, not the capable. “Come in, Miss Holloway,” he managed. “May I get you some refreshment?”

“No, thank you. But please help yourself.”

D.T. let her precede him into his office, then turned and watched as Bobby E. Lee lifted his jacket off the coat rack, draped it across his shoulders, and sauntered to the door. When he reached it he turned back and saw D.T. watching him. He shrugged a wordless disclaimer and opened the door and entered his other world.

D.T. entered his office and took his seat and watched as the eggplant eyes of Rita Holloway took in his lair. What she saw mostly were books, law books numbered and stacked in tiers, text books arranged by subject, special books inside an antique glass case, including the leatherbound set of novels given to him by his ex-wife, all of them written by men about women—
Moll Flanders
and
Clarissa, Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenina, Sister Carrie, Ruby Red
, and
The Easter Parade
.

After sweeping through the books her black eyes lingered over the tousled heap on his library table, the detritus of a brief in progress, the issue a divorced wife's right to abort her child over the father's objection and offer of custody and support following birth. Her forehead wrinkled at the peculiar pen-and-ink drawings on the wall—Michele's essay into a Germanic style of political art, inspired by Watergate, the Vietnam War, and the death of Doctor King. Her lips pursed at the distinctly residential furnishings, possibly because they had been donated to D.T. by a client who, after a long period of living alone, had remarried at age fifty and acquired a spare set of almost everything and who seemed to believe that wood should be veneered to look as much as possible like cream sauce. Her nostrils narrowed because among and around it all were the piles of old briefs and current case files,
Racing Forms
and
Sporting News
, legal newspapers and bar journals, a fishless aquarium, a broken bust of Brahms, and the thises and thats of twenty years of talking to people about troubles that were so bad they were willing to pay a slender stranger to solve them. And then the full lips smiled, and Rita Holloway stood up and went to inspect the stimulus more closely.

It lay atop a file cabinet, a small diorama, exquisitely crafted, a western town, laden with detail from the Silver Dollar Saloon to the tiny horseshoes in the tiny forge in the tiny blacksmith's shop at the end of the tiny street. Michele had found it at a model railroad show and had presented it to him on the first anniversary of their divorce, adding only one detail to the extant perfection. At each edge of town she had placed a sign, and on it in the tiniest script decipherable she had written two words: Split City. When Rita Holloway read the words she laughed.

“Souvenir?” she asked as she sat back down.

“E Pluribus Unum.”

“What are the others?”

“I have a drawer full, most of them unmentionable.”

“Oh, go ahead and mention them.”

He matched her grin and shrugged. “A pair of panties ripped off to reveal a legally irrelevant contusion. A wrist bandage unwrapped to reveal the scabs of a bungled suicide. And, let's see, a pencil drawing of the distinctly peculiar conformation of a husband's penis. A purposely punctured diaphragm. Pornographic snapshots. Love letters. Suspiciously stained handkerchiefs. Credit card receipts from Nevada whorehouses. And all kinds of other stuff that one client or another thought had something to do with why they were in my office.”

Rita Holloway was chuckling happily when he finished. “An interesting life.”

“Occasionally.”

“What made those little holes in the floor?” She turned back to look at them.

“Golf cleats,” he said, stimulated in spite of himself by the interest she seemed to take in what he supposed was his life.

“But you shouldn't have done that. It'll cost a fortune to replace that parquet.”

D.T. shrugged. “At the time it was indispensable to my immediate well-being to hit a nice crisp wedge shot. Not being at a golf course seemed an inadequate deterrent.”

Her black eyes widened. “Did you hit it?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“The ball lodged between Volumes 238 and 239 of the
Pacific Reporter
.”

“Do you always do impulsive, destructive things like that?”

“Only on my good days.”

She frowned and considered his remark more closely than it deserved. An earnest person, apparently one of the rare ones who believed there were things to be learned in the world if you paid attention. When she started to say something D.T. put up a hand to stop her.

“Why have you come to me, Miss Holloway? I assume you're married, in which case you shouldn't be calling yourself Miss. Not yet. Creditors don't like it.”

“I'm not married,” Rita Holloway said simply.

“Then how long have you lived with him?” he asked, exasperated because it was only a palimony case and Miss Holloway seemed smarter than that. There were good reasons to live with someone out of wedlock, but not if you expected some sort of financial settlement at the conclusion of the relationship. And since such relationships always concluded, it meant living together was still a man's best friend,
Marvin
v.
Marvin
notwithstanding.

“I don't live with anyone but my dog,” she said, surprising him again. “His name is Toledo. He's half Husky and half wolf and he's very mean when I want him to be,” she added, smiling momentarily once again, completely unmean herself from the look of it. Non-usual, Bobby E. Lee had called her. Yes, indeed.

Miss Holloway brushed back a delinquent hair, then folded her hands and stored them on her lap.

“Why the hell are you here?” he asked. “If it's about Toledo, I have to tell you I don't defend dog-bite cases.”

“Oh, I know that, Mr. Jones. And Toledo doesn't bite, he just looks like he's about to. You're a divorce lawyer. Right?”

“Right. The question is, why on earth do you need one?”

“Oh, I don't.”

He made a fist and struck his desk. “Jesus Christ, Miss Holloway. I've just been mauled by the Friday Fiasco, and interviewed a woman whose husband presented her with divorce papers the way he would the ketchup and another whose husband tried to abort her from outside the womb, and here you are, cracking wise, playing mystery games. What the hell is it? You a reporter or something? Reporters are the only ones I know who smile like that, like they own the world and have it trained to shit on paper and beg for food.”

Finally the smile was gone. “I don't think that was called for.”

“Probably not, but then what is?” D.T. was certain he should have been contrite, and equally certain that he was perversely not. He stared at her until she spoke.

“I'm not a reporter, Mr. Jones,” she admonished. “I'm a nurse. I'm here about one of my patients. I've been smiling because everything I've seen so far indicates you might be the right man. The one who'll take the case.”

“What case?” D.T. asked, the question shoving hard against his better judgment.

“Maybe I'd better start from the beginning.”

“Maybe you had. In the meantime, I'm going to have a drink. Care to join me?”

“Sure.”

“Scotch?”

“Fine.”

D.T. got glasses from the credenza—the everyday ones—a bottle from the file cabinet, and ice from the freezer, and mixed the drinks. Each watched the other as they took their medicinal gulps. “You may begin,” D.T. said.

“First tell me what the D.T. stands for.”

“Delirium Tremens,” D.T. said. “Now let's get on with it. If you need a refill just touch your nose with your tongue.”

“How did you know I could do that?”

“Can you?”

She convinced him.

“I imagine that's a big hit on the terminal ward.”

“As a matter of fact, it is.”

He sighed. “Please don't tell me about death, Miss Holloway. I'm sure you know a lot about it, but I'd really rather not hear about death at the moment.”

Rita Holloway nodded briskly. “It's life I'm here about. A rather spectacular one, at that.”

“Explain.”

She got comfortable and gathered air, a tidy package of concern. He hoped to hell it wasn't medical malpractice. If it was he'd refer it out. Tempting, though. The plum he'd been waiting for, maybe. But he was too old for malpractice, too old to learn the medicine, too old to bluff the insurance monsters. He'd refer it out. Preferably to someone who would kick back half the fee.

“I'm a practical nurse,” Rita Holloway began. “I work in private homes mostly, old people, invalids, that kind of thing. I have a regular list of clients, usually about ten, that I look in on at least every other day. I'm good at my work and I'm well paid, well enough so that two of my ten are taken on a
pro bono
basis.”

D.T. nodded, unease developing like a chancre as he wondered if he were in the presence of a special being. God, he hated people who were able to do good effortlessly, whose impulses were charitable, not selfish. He had once represented an ex-nun who was becoming an ex-wife. She had made him feel septic for months. He was cured only by learning she smoked dope.

“One of my current patients is a woman named Esther Preston,” Rita Holloway continued blithely. “She lives on Eighty-sixth Street. She has no family. She's about forty-five and she has multiple sclerosis. She lives her life in a wheelchair and she's the most wonderful human being I've ever met.”

The encomium reverberated among the books, was confirmed by silence. D.T. looked to see if the statement was a joke or a ploy. It seemed neither, but Miss Holloway's purpose was already in part accomplished. Already the crippled woman was a shadow on his brain.