Joel Goldman - Chasing The Dead

Rossi’s message was clear. Alex dropped her chin to her chest, biting her lip, anger swelling and rising from her belly. She sat up, squaring around at him.

“Is that what this is about, Rossi? You sit down next to me like this is a PTSD support group and pretend you give a shit about me? Why, because you think I’ve got a guilty conscience and if you give me some love, I’ll come clean?”

“I guarantee you’ll feel better. And why not come clean? You’ve got the double-jeopardy passport to freedom. Or you can spend the rest of your life hanging out in dive bars, drinking alone in the middle of the week, wondering if Bonnie’s figured it out yet and what she’ll do when she does and if you’ll ever get another good night’s sleep or if you’ll ever stop being so pissed off at yourself for making such a fucking mess of your life.”

Alex stood, trembling. Rossi had gutted her, and it was all she could do not to scream and take a swing at him or just puddle onto the floor and cry like a baby. She gripped the back of the barstool, steadying herself and gritting her teeth.

“Where the hell do you get off, Rossi? I was fucking acquitted, you miserable asshole! So take your bullshit psychology and stick it up your ass with your fucking lump of coal.”

Rossi’s face was a pool of calm. “You want my advice, Counselor, I’d get a grip on that anger. Makes you hard to live with.”

Alex didn’t answer. She dropped a dollar on the bar and left without looking back.

The public defender’s offices were on the twentieth and twenty-first floors of Oak Tower at Eleventh and Oak, one of Kansas City’s first skyscrapers. The original fourteen stories were doubled in 1929, and in 1974 the terra-cotta exterior was blanketed in stucco, a sad example of style buried by progress. Its days as class A office space long behind it, Oak Tower was perfect for public defenders, who didn’t have to worry about impressing clients. Lawyers who dealt in life and death had bigger issues than the pale rose paint chipping off the walls and the threadbare carpet lining the halls.

On her drive downtown the next morning, Alex bounced back and forth between how Judge West had blackmailed her with the photograph and how Hank Rossi had dissected her psyche. Both had unnerved her in spite of the show she’d put on, leaving her feeling raw inside and out.

When Alex got off the elevator, no one was at the receptionist’s desk, the secretaries’ stations were abandoned, and the halls were empty. She’d started toward her office when Grace Canfield came out of the bathroom, wiping her swollen red eyes with a tissue.

Grace was one of the investigators in the PD’s office. Middle-aged and stout, her black hair cut short and spiky and flecked with gray, she was a lifelong resident of Kansas City’s east side, home to many of the African American clients Alex defended. She went to church with their families, worked their cases, and went to their funerals, giving her more street cred than any lawyer in the office; even the gangbangers called her Miz Grace.

“Grace, why are you crying? Where is everybody?”

“Oh, Alex,” she said, fighting back tears, her voice catching. “It’s Robin. She was killed last night in a car accident. They’re all in the conference room.”

Robin Norris had spent thirty years in the public defender’s office, the last twenty running the operation. She hired Alex straight out of law school, raising her from a pup, as Robin put it after Alex won a case no one thought could have been won, and she took Alex back after the Dwayne Reed case when everyone bet she wouldn’t. Her death left Alex numb, the reality not yet registering. Though she’d heard the words, part of her brain refused to accept the news, believing instead that someone must have made a mistake. She slumped against the wall, wide-eyed and gut punched.

“What happened?”

“She was out somewhere up north and lost control of her car and ran off the road. She was dead at the scene.”

“Oh, my God!”

Grace sniffed and straightened, wiping her hands against her sides. “I know. I know, but if I don’t get to work and get my mind on something else, I’m going to spend the whole day crying, and that’s only gonna make me feel worse.”

Alex went to the conference room, pushing the wooden doors open and stepping into a sea of sorrow. People were hugging as they sobbed or staring out the windows, dazed and mute. Others were milling around the room, lost. Alex moved from one to another, squeezing a hand, rubbing a back, and giving a hug, tears rolling off her cheeks, everyone muttering that it couldn’t be real, that it didn’t make sense, and that it wasn’t fair, all of it true.

Looking out on the city, she saw the muddy Missouri River rolling past the north side of downtown on its way to St. Louis. A century and a half ago, bluffs a hundred feet high hid the view of the river until ancestral Kansas Citians carved through them, laying the streets that now ran two hundred feet beneath where she stood. Microscopic people glided by Oak Tower, as distant from her and her loss as those who had dug their way from the river. Robin’s death had stopped time for her and everyone else in the room, the rest of the world swirling around them, sweeping past without a second glance.

“Can I have your attention, everyone.”

Alex turned around to see the woman who had joined them. She was slender, her sandy hair cut in a bob. Half a head shorter than Alex, and in her forties, she was dressed in a dark-green pantsuit from the Hillary Clinton collection. On Alex’s beauty scale, Bonnie was at the top and everyone else was ordinary, though this woman was ordinary-plus in spite of the pantsuit, the strength in her face and the glint in her hazel eyes setting her apart.

“My name is Meg Adler. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. I work in the St. Louis PD’s office-at least I did until I got the call about Robin. I caught the seven a.m. flight on Southwest and got here as quickly as I could. I’ve been assigned to take Robin’s place-not that anyone can really do that-until a permanent replacement is chosen. I know what a difficult time this is for everybody, but-and I don’t mean to sound callous-we’ve got clients, cases, and trials. We’ll let you know about funeral arrangements as soon as we can. I’ll be stopping by each of your offices so we can get better acquainted. In the meantime, I know this may sound corny, but from what I’ve been told about Robin I think it’s true-let’s get back to work because that’s what she’d want us to do.”

Alex took the long way to her office so that she could walk by Robin’s, lingering in the open doorway, imagining Robin sitting behind her desk, glasses halfway down her nose, engrossed in her latest bureaucratic tangle. She’d given up the courtroom to be an administrator, keeping the office afloat with the budgetary equivalent of bubblegum and Band-Aids.

The credenza behind her desk was crowded with framed photographs of her five children, a timeline of their lives. She wore last year’s styles, buying them on sale to save money for her kids, did her own hair and nails, and told everyone else how great they looked. Fifty-five years old, she’d earned every wrinkle and every extra pound that she wished she could lose. She was a single mother, divorced when her oldest child was not yet ten, her ex-husband long removed from their lives. Alex had always marveled at Robin’s grit, raising two families, the kids at home and the people at work. Thinking of both families made her heart hurt.

There were a few nonfamily photographs tucked in among the rest. One showed Robin shaking hands with the governor, one showed her in the bleachers at a Royals game after she caught a home run ball, arms stretched to the sky in celebration, and another, taken six months ago, showed her receiving an award at the annual Missouri State Bar Association meeting at a hotel in St. Louis. Judge Anthony Steele, who’d recently been elevated from circuit court trial judge to judge for the Missouri Court of Appeals, presented an award to Robin for outstanding service. In the photograph, the two of them were shaking hands and smiling for the camera. Alex had been there. True to form, Robin gave all the credit for the award to the lawyers and staff in her office.