Steve Martini - The Arraignment

“Is that what you’re doing? Well. God forbid,” he says, “but if somebody shoots you, I’d probably shed some tears. I’d bury you in style, say some moving words over your grave. I’d do what I could to look after Sarah. Or at least see that she was cared for. I’d think about you a lot, and I’d get on with my life.”

“Hard-nosed,” I say.

“On things I can’t control, you’re damn right. We made a decision,” he says, “a long time ago. We take no drug cases. We agreed. For good reason. There’s too much time spent coming up to speed on the decisional law, the flow of appellate opinions on the subject being on the order of a ruptured sewer over Niagara. Besides, there are some things you just don’t want to do. Like climbing up on the legal stump for organized crime. You can end up finding out about things you’d rather not know. Stuff that keeps you up nights wondering if you hooked all the chains and turned all the bolts on your doors and whether you have enough bars on your windows.”

“That’s why I didn’t take Metz,” I tell him.

“Right,” says Harry. “Because we agreed. So why don’t you blame me that Nick got his ass shot off? I can live with it.” With this he turns and heads out the door, down the hall toward his office.

For several minutes I sit there looking at the newspaper article, the name Miguelito Espinoza, and wondering what Metz would want with border-crossing visas.

Then I go out to the reception. Marta is there catching up on filing. I open one of the file cabinets, the drawer labeled M through O.

“Can I find something for you?” Marta looks up from her desk.

“Think I found it.” I pull the file on Gerald Metz.

“How’s your day going?” I ask.

“Good.” She smiles brightly.

Within ninety days, in her efficient way, Marta would have closed this file, there being no billing activity. She would have placed it in archives, in one of the cardboard boxes stored in the bungalow two doors down. And if she is still with us in a few years, she would toss it, have it hauled to some landfill, the ultimate archive of American culture.

Quietly I retreat to my office with the file. There isn’t much in it, the few letters given to me by Metz that morning in my office, along with my notes, scrawled on some pages from a yellow notepad. There on the third page written out and underlined twice is the name Miguelito Espinoza, with an address and telephone number in Santee. It was the name on the rat-eared business card given to me that morning in my office by Metz. Espinoza had acted as the go-between with the two brothers down in Mexico on their supposed development scheme with Metz.

I haven’t seen Margaret Rush in more than three years, so when she opens the front door, she gives me an expression that says she recognizes the face but can’t quite fix the name.

“Margaret, it’s Paul Madriani.”

A moment of hesitation and then: “Oh yes.” She smiles, struggles to arrange her hair with the back of one hand. There is dirt under her fingernails. She is wearing a pair of jeans with smudges of mud at the knees.

“I’m afraid you caught me gardening,” she says.

“I wonder if I could come in for just a moment?”

She hesitates, caught between concerns for security and a social blunder, then fumbles with the latch on the screen door. “Of course.”

“It’s been a long time,” I tell her.

“It has.” I can tell she is still not entirely certain who I am. She recognizes the name, the face, but can’t quite place the setting in which we met.

“I think we saw each other last on that bay cruise. The county bar reception, a few years ago,” I tell her.

“Oh. Yes.” Recognition lights up her eyes. “You were a friend of Nick’s.”

“I was.”

Her expression tells me she now regrets letting me in. “I really don’t have much time,” she says. “I was just getting ready to head out.”

“I won’t take but a minute.”

“What is it you want?” she says. “You’ll have to make it quick.”

“How have you been?”

“Me? I’ve been fine.” She stands in the entryway. “Can I ask what this is about?”

“Can we go in and sit down?” I ask.

“I suppose. But I only have a minute.”

She turns toward the living room and I follow her. The room is small, on the order of the house itself, a single-story rambler on a street of well-groomed strips of front lawn, lined with established Japanese elms. There is a sofa against one wall facing the front window and the street. Feminine knickknacks of china and crystal and a small antique tea set line shelves that are high on the wall and surround the room. There is a beveled glass china cabinet against one wall and a single wingback chair in the corner next to the fireplace. She sits in this, leaving me to take the couch.

“I didn’t see you at the funeral, but then there were a lot of people.”

“Nick’s funeral?” she says.

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t there. That part of my life ended some time ago,” she says. “What is it you want to talk about?”

It seems we are not going to do any small talk.

Her hair has gone gray since I saw her last. Wrinkles envelope her face around the eyes. The tense expression on her face tells me that she may have washed Nick out of her life years ago, but thoughts of him still occupy dark recesses of her mind.

“How’s your son, Jimmy is it?”

“James,” she says. “He’s fine.”

“I wanted to talk to you about Nick.”

“What about him?” she says.

“It’s actually about his estate.”

“Oh, yes. Now I understand. They called from the firm a couple of days ago and told me. It’s the insurance policy, isn’t it?”

“Yes, the key-man policy,” I tell her.

“Did she send you?”

“Who?”

“Who,” she says in a mocking tone, the creases around her eyes focusing the anger in her voice. “You know who I mean. Dana.”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To avoid a problem,” I tell her. “To resolve a potential dispute. Maybe to do what I think is right.”

“And what is that?”

“Nick is dead. He’s out of everyone’s life at this point, yours, hers. There may be aspects of this policy that benefit both of you.”

“You sound just like Nick, just trying to make peace, fix everything for everybody. Oh, by the way, I’m screwing my interior decorator and I’d like a divorce, but it’s nothing personal.”

“You have every reason to be angry.”

“You bet I do.”

“But in your anger, you don’t want to hurt yourself,” I tell her.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve received a copy of the policy?”

“Yes.”

“And you know your name is on it as the beneficiary?”

“I do.”

“You’re also aware that there was a property settlement agreement at the time of the divorce?”

She looks at me but doesn’t respond. She knows this is the issue.

“I take it you’re represented by a lawyer in this matter?”

“Why should I have to tell you that?”

“You don’t have to tell me anything. If you are, represented by a lawyer I mean, that’s good. If so, I should be talking to him.”

“It’s a woman.” She says it in a tone that makes me think male lawyers are not to be trusted.

“If you’ll give me her name, I’ll take it up with her and she can communicate with you.”

“Her name is Susan Glendenin.”

“She works for the Petersen law firm downtown?”

“That’s right.”

“I know her.” A stroke of good luck. Susan Glendenin is a good lawyer; more important, she is a voice of reason in a bar increasingly peopled by lawyers who pride themselves on taking no prisoners and who operate on the maxim “screw reason, let’s go to war.”