Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unlucky in Law

“I’ll go without you.”

She reacted to the blow by leaping up to tidy. “What?”

“I can take the train to Truckee. Uncle Matt will pick me up from there.”

“But-”

“I’m going.”

For quite a while, they went back and forth. Eventually, her ability to structure a reasonable argument vaporized in the face of his strenuous desire. Nina agreed to drive him up to the train station early Saturday morning. He would go for the weekend.

Her phone rang. Bob cleared the table and went back to his CDs while Klaus spoke.

“You have the autopsy and material sent from the medical examiner’s office?” he asked.

“Of course.” She finished off the sandwich.

“Susan Misumi is up tomorrow.”

“Right,” she said.

“I enjoyed the picture you painted today of the brandy glass flying into Stefan’s wide-open mouth.”

“Thank you. Did you call about anything particular?”

“I was just checking in,” Klaus said hesitantly, and Nina experienced another knuckle-biting moment of doubt. Had he forgotten why he called?

She asked him to talk to Stefan about trying to appear more confident in court, and, with a tolerant sigh, Klaus promised he would. “His courtroom style won’t win the case.”

She knew it, and she knew very well the pitfalls in trying to control every ineffable in a case, but creating a good impression was about the only contribution Stefan could make at this point, and she felt he should be doing it. As for Klaus, he was an enigma.

Only thing she knew for sure was that second chair in this trial was an active place to be.

Later, from her bed, Nina called Paul. “Wish you were here. I could use your-”

“I like the sound of that,” he interrupted. “What are you wearing?”

“A cold compress on my neck.”

“Oh, yeah, you sexy thing.”

She laughed, then said more soberly, “Detective Banta practically convicted Stefan single-handedly today.”

“She’s very experienced.”

Nina heard the comedy station in the background. “You knew her, didn’t you?”

“Way back when. Sure, I knew Kelsey.”

“What did you think of her?” Nina didn’t know what she was looking for and wasn’t sure she wanted to find it anyway.

“Straight arrow,” Paul said.

“Did you date her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She’s attractive.”

He seemed to find the question amusing. “I like her, and I never knew her to tweak the truth. But no, I never dated her.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Nina, she was married. Then, when her brother got killed, she was a secret drinker. Not my idea of a fun date.” He waited for her to say something. When she didn’t he said, “You there?”

“Just silently finishing my wine here,” she said.

He laughed. “Who’s up tomorrow?”

“Uh, the medical examiner. Dr. Misumi.”

“Susan,” Paul said.

The way he said her name, a kind of warm familiarity as he wound his mouth around the word, made Nina sit up in bed alertly. “That’s right. Susan Misumi. You know her?”

“Her, I dated,” Paul said.

Friday 9/19

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL HAD BEEN THE ARRANGEMENT BETWEEN PAUL and Nina regarding other recent partners. Even the fact that there was an arrangement had been a don’t tell. In truth, they had never talked about it.

Nina admitted to herself now that she had been cowardly. She herself had nothing to tell that he didn’t already know, and she wasn’t certain how she would react to finding out about Paul’s other lovers. She hadn’t asked him for any details, had taken the news the night before with admirable lawyerly equanimity.

Then at four A.M. she woke up worrying, not about Stefan or Klaus or Bob, but about Paul, thinking, I shouldn’t have moved out of his condo like that, on such short notice, without dealing with the implications first. I could have talked Paul into moving somewhere bigger, where he could have his office and space. Bob could be at the far end of the house with the space apart from us that he needs, too. I should have resolved the marriage issue right away, when Paul asked.

She knew the ostensible reason they had moved here. Aunt Helen’s house, Nina’s house now, had been available, and she hadn’t had much time. But she had lurched gracelessly away from Paul, and she wouldn’t be surprised if he held it against her, even if only unconsciously.

Putting the ostensible reason aside, why had she moved so swiftly?

After half an hour of lying in the dark with thoughts stomping heavily through her mind, she gave up and turned on the bed stand light. Her window was open and she could hear the distant bark of seals. The fog moved around in the room with her, like a living presence. In the little room down the hall, Bob muttered restlessly in his sleep.

Paul should give up on me, she thought with a sudden conviction, experiencing an awful mix of fear, insecurity, and loneliness.

After a year of seeing no one but Paul, and years before of seeing him nonexclusively, she should know what to do, but she felt as if she were balanced in the center of the seesaw, unable to move. Either direction, and she would land with a nasty thud.

They had such differences between them, and those differences could be fatal. She flashed to unhappy pictures of Paul in her mind: Paul cleaning his guns; Paul describing various acts of violence he had committed; Paul drunk one night when she had needed him; Paul telling her what to do, trying to push her around, resenting her for being the lawyer employing him as investigator, second-guessing her, not respecting her opinions.

But then: Paul making love to her so sweetly a few nights before. And: Paul’s smarts, Paul’s jokes, Paul’s charm, his devotion over the past years, even when she had been married to another man.

And the moment that had defined their relationship forever: Paul lying in wait outside her house one night, waiting for a killer to arrive and try to break in; Paul killing for her, burying the body God knew where. No one except Bob had any inkling of it. They never talked about it. “I took out the trash,” Paul had once told her, and she-she had thanked him.

She loved so much about him, and she believed he loved her. He thought he had proved he would do anything for her, but she could never bridge the distance that the killing had opened between them. He had fearsome qualities that scared her. Ultimately, she did not trust him completely.

I love him, she thought as she had so many times before. I can’t do without him. But…

She gave up and wandered into the living room. From outside, a streetlight spilled a soft glow over the old couch. She had loaned her cabin at Tahoe to a woman in trouble who had three kids, who now sat on the new brown couch she had bought, used the plates from Mikasa she and Bob had picked out. Another woman lawyer now sat in the Starlake Building office with the orange client chairs Nina had bought at Ric’s in Reno one snowy day…

What am I doing here? she asked herself. Three hundred miles from Tahoe, where her home and her work were, she existed in a time warp, working for her boss from years ago, Bob not happy.

She answered her own question. She was here for herself and Paul.

Paul, who had told her just a few hours before, “You weren’t available at the time, and Susan is an old friend, so we got together a few times. That’s all.” She had heard the small resentment in his voice, as if it were her fault he’d had to find another lover to fill in the space.

Due to other matters Judge Salas had to take up, court resumed at eleven on Friday morning and was scheduled to run only through twelve, then from one-thirty to three. Nina wore her black suit with the white silk blouse with cuffs. After some hesitation she had also sprayed on some ancient Chanel No. 5 of Aunt Helen’s she found hidden at the back of the bathroom cupboard. Two ibuprofen, Rice Krispies, and orange juice sloshed against each other in her stomach.