Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unlucky in Law

“You may step down,” Salas told Ginger. Ginger passed Nina on her way out to the hall where the witnesses had to wait. She leaned down to whisper, “Am I cool or what?”

“Stick around outside. I didn’t get half your testimony.”

“Don’t forget to check out that death certificate for Constantin. We should definitely discuss that when you get a second.”

“Okay, thanks.” Nina shuffled through her paperwork to find the certificate, then looked down at her legal pad, which held a few Q and As and a comic-booky series of sketches showing a glass thrown, connecting, shattering.

She called Gabe Wyatt to the stand. He was sworn in, giving his name in a strong enough voice. She imagined that he would have dressed differently if he had known he’d be giving a show today-the khaki pants weren’t pressed and he wore a green polo shirt. Examining the back of his head as he swore to tell the whole truth, he looked a lot like Stefan, but better.

“You are the defendant’s older brother?”

“Yes.”

“How much older?”

“One year.”

“What is your occupation?”

“I’m a junior executive at Classic Collections.”

So let the jury think he had friends in fashion. Nina didn’t care. “Where did you attend school?”

“Pacific Grove High, then Monterey Peninsula College for a while.”

“Did you graduate?”

“Yeah, from high school. My family wasn’t well off,” he explained. “College was a luxury we couldn’t afford.” He nodded as if to himself and Nina realized with a stab of joy that he wanted to tell a story, was dying to tell it. All she had to do was get out of the way.

“You and Stefan lived with your mother, Wanda Wyatt?”

“In a two-bedroom shack we rented. Our mother worked as a maid most of the years we were growing up.”

“You’ve done well,” Nina said.

“I don’t like my work, but I work hard. I’m paid enough to get by.”

“Where was your father while you were growing up?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“He didn’t live at home?”

“My mother told us he left us, and died somewhere else. She told us a lot of lies about him.”

“How do you know that?”

“Recently, she told me the truth.”

“When was that?”

“Last spring. I stopped by the house. My mother was looking at an old picture of the old man she had worked for before we were born. She’d had a few.”

“Do you remember your father?”

He shook his head. “I don’t. I guess he must have come around sometimes, but I don’t remember him. Neither does Stefan.” He sounded resentful.

“What truth about your father did she tell you?”

“She said my father was Constantin Zhukovsky.”

This much Nina knew from Wanda’s testimony, but now she wanted to go further. She let her own curiosity lead her in her questions. If Jaime wanted to object, he would.

“What was your reaction to that?”

“Anger. He died in 1978. I was only four, but she told me that, other than when I was an infant, he wasn’t around. He must have been ashamed of me and my brother, ashamed of our mother. He had married her, though, I saw the marriage certificate. We were his legitimate children, but he was fixated on his first two. The father’s name on our birth certificates said John Wyatt. Our mother told us he was an insurance salesman who died when we were young.”

“The ‘first two’ children you’re referring to are Christina and Alex Zhukovsky, is that correct?”

“Exactly. They had not been told, either. I decided to check into the whole situation.”

“The situation being your father’s marriage?”

“The situation being my whole fake childhood. The situation being the deprivation he let us grow up in. The situation being how the first two got coddled, while Stef and I couldn’t-didn’t have anything.” Envy and bitterness flavored his words.

Nina let them spread over the courtroom, then asked, “And how did you go about checking into this?”

“First, I looked at the death certificate. I saw how and when he died.”

Nina brought the copy of the certificate for him to examine. “Is this it?”

“Yes.”

It was entered into evidence.

“According to this, your father, Constantin Zhukovsky, died in 1978 of a syndrome known as thrombocytopenia.”

“That’s right. I did some reading on the topic, and questioned my mother some more. Turns out, he had a blood disease, aplastic anemia, which led to a syndrome, thrombocytopenia, that had made him sick off and on for years, especially toward the end. That got me thinking. After all, I had aplastic anemia that led to a serious blood disease, when I was a child.”

“So you came to believe what your mother had told you?”

“It was a weak link, but yeah, I believed her. By then I was hooked. I took a look at my new siblings. I found out where Alex was teaching and I shadowed him for a few days. I knocked on his door in Carmel Highlands one day when he was out and the cleaning people were there, and I saw his furniture. Roche-Bobois sofa and chairs, rug worth a fortune. He drove a new Coupe de Ville.”

“And what was the purpose of this shadowing?”

“Curiosity. I wanted to see what he was like. I wanted to see if he had money. Then I did the same with Christina.”

“You checked her out?”

“She got up late, sat on her balcony making phone calls, ate lunch at nice restaurants in town. She dated now and then and had friends over to lavish spreads. She was working on some kind of Russian conference at the college, but there was something more going on. She drove a Caddy, too, an Escalade SUV. Any idea what those cost?”

“Why don’t you tell us, Mr. Wyatt.”

“Fifty grand stripped down.”

Nina said, “Were you jealous of how well your new siblings lived?”

“Hey, no. I prefer my mom’s hand-me-down Taurus to her Escalade. I like going forty-five because it won’t go any faster on hills. Of course I was damned jealous.”

“What happened then?”

“This conference happened. The Russian one that Christina organized.”

Nina continued to ask open-ended questions. Gabe went on with his story.

Gabe Wyatt went to the conference on post-Soviet Russia at Cal State. In spite of what he had recently learned about his father, he didn’t care about Russia. He had a different agenda, to follow Christina. Unlike their father, she was alive. He understood Alex. Now he wanted to understand her.

He had ruminated upon the fact that she had grown up with their shared father, and that she and her brother were somehow the favored ones, being legitimate in the eyes of the world, while he and Stefan were the ugly secrets. It was almost worse than before, when at least he could fantasize that his father loved him.

The lack of money mixed in with the lack of love. Too late on the love front. Maybe he could still get some of the money, do something big with it, something important. He had waited all his life for a break. Maybe this was it.

At the opening ceremony, Christina introduced the keynote speaker. From the second row, Gabe studied her, listening for a familiar note in her voice but discovering none. He looked at her blue eyes, and thought maybe they looked like Stefan’s. Certainly, nothing about this woman reminded him of himself. She was a complete stranger who had gotten between Gabe and his father.

Getting antsy to see if she recognized something in him, he tested her a few times, trying to catch her eye, walking close by that first day. During lunch, he sat down beside her on a bench briefly while she ate. But she didn’t notice anything unusual. She didn’t seem any more connected than he did. She faded into the woodwork after the duty of introductions, a forceful but quiet intellectual woman.