Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unfit to Practice

Locking Sandy’s car carefully, Nina tramped across wet grass to reach the mass of granite boulders erected to honor two Tahoe pioneers. Kevin Cruz sat in a tiny patch of sunshine on one of the large rocks smoking a cigarette.

“Hi, Kevin,” Nina said.

“Hi.”

They sat down on the bench and talked, Kevin firing up every two minutes, Nina wondering how to approach the bad news she carried and full of questions for him about Lisa.

Kevin had bulked up since his wife left him six months before. Like Officer Scholl, in perennial cop fashion, he wore impenetrable shades over his eyes. He didn’t look good today. He must have been to the barber, because his hair was so aggressively trimmed Nina could see pink scalp under the fair hair. His court clothes, a sport coat and slacks, looked unfinished without his usual nightstick appended. One of those men who look hopelessly phony in a necktie, he had settled for an open shirt under the jacket.

“You were brilliant yesterday,” Kevin was saying again.

“Kevin, there’s something you haven’t told me. Lisa’s got something personal against me.”

“Hey, you got what you needed to get out of her,” he said. “She got mad. She looked bad. She showed what a witch she can be.”

“Kevin. C’mon.”

“Okay, okay.” He stamped out one cigarette on the ground and rummaged for another. “I didn’t see any point in telling you,” he started. “Ah, shit. Okay. She holds you responsible for her father’s death.”

“What?”

“It’s a long story, but I’ll give you the short form. Her dad ran a small logging company that did a lot of cutting up near Wright’s Lake. Sound familiar?”

“Maybe.”

“Remember Richard Gardener? Client of yours? Guy who lost his leg in a logging accident.”

She remembered.

“You helped his worker’s-comp lawyer get him a big award, then you went after the company for shoddy safety practices and won a bunch more. Well, her old man ran the logging company, and that lawsuit wiped him out. He died shortly after it folded, heart attack. She blamed you.”

She remembered the bankruptcy, the notice she had received of the death.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Why did you hire me, Kevin?”

He flushed, embarrassed. “She was always on about how tricky you were in court, how smart-ass. I didn’t know you, Nina, I just knew I wanted a damn good lawyer. You fit the bill. I never liked her dad. He was such a sleazeball, and to be honest, it always sounded to me like your guy deserved the money.”

Nina thought about that for a while. Realizing she was in the situation too deep to climb out, she decided to accept it. “It’s a big day for your case,” she said finally. “We’re winding things up. Are you ready?”

“I’m not ready for any of this. You know, I never hit Lisa, never scared the kids, always supported the family, always came home after my shift. But I know I made mistakes.”

“We have to talk about that,” Nina started, but Kevin rushed on.

“I think you were right yesterday, when you pointed out that her dad’s death hit hard. He cherished her and spoiled her. She isn’t as close to her mom.” He shrugged. “Who knows why? But she was never a happy person. Since her dad died she’s in a permanent state of, I don’t know what to call it. Confusion? Despair? She’s like a speed freak out to find a cure. She grabs at anything that might give her a moment’s peace. Heather and Joey are so confused, they forget how to tie their shoes right.”

“Kevin, listen.”

“But the firefighting will go the way of all her other fads. She’s probably already losing interest, talking about throwing it up to train as a nurse. Or an optometrist. Or a dancer. Or a skydiver, maybe.” He sighed. “She’ll never be happy. She’s a terrible influence. Thank God I’m going to get those kids away from her before she wrecks them.”

“Kevin-” Nina put her hand on his arm.

Reading something in her expression, he shut up.

“They know about Alexandra Peck.”

Only two weeks before, during one of two panicky, weepy, middle-of-the-night phone calls to Nina, Kevin had told Nina a secret. After a big argument with Lisa, she had kicked him out of their bed and he had started sleeping with a seventeen-year-old police cadet.

In one of those programs that are nobly conceived but loaded with hazards, high school students rode around with patrol cops on evening shifts to observe, learn, and assist. Like police officers, they wore uniforms and looked like adults, but these were kids, half of them girls, while the cops they rode with one-on-one were almost all adult men.

Kevin, raised in a small Catholic New Mexico town, had married Lisa at twenty. When he met Alexandra Peck, he didn’t know what hit him. “It just happened,” he said, and the shame in his voice over the phone only magnified the banality of his words. “We rode together for three months before I touched her. I fought it for a long time, but-Ali had no compunctions. She said she had fallen in love with me, and God, how that girl came on to me. I was so lonely. Nobody cared about me but her. In the end I couldn’t resist.”

Next he would be telling her that the girl was very grown-up for her age. Nina didn’t want to hear it. “How did it end?”

“She bolted,” Kevin said, “right after I asked her to marry me.”

“How is she now?”

“I don’t know. She dropped out of the program. She lives with her parents, so I don’t feel right about calling.”

No, Nina had thought. He wouldn’t. As he talked, she thought about affirmative action, about bringing women into male-dominated professions, about human nature, about the victims of this particularly ill-conceived experiment in social engineering. Disgusted and disappointed in her client, she allowed a few cynical thoughts about the naiveté of the police-department human-services staff who had dreamed up this program, but she kept her opinions to herself.

Kevin’s confession rearranged the balance of blame for the failure of the marriage, if Nina had cared to think about that, but she was Kevin’s advocate, not his judge. Kevin had assured her during that late-night phone call he had been very careful and that no one knew, not Ali’s parents, not his chiefs, and especially not Lisa.

Up to now, the story had stayed hidden in Kevin’s file, existing only in Nina’s scribbled notes on yellow legal paper.

Now Nina put a hand on the cold granite rock and told Kevin that Alexandra Peck had been discovered.

“Of course we can object to the late notice,” she said. “But Kevin, suddenly the case is complicated. The recommendations might change.”

His latest cigarette had burned down his finger. He dropped it.

“There’s more.” Steeling herself, Nina told him her Bronco had been stolen the night before and that his file had been inside it. “It’s possible-I mean, we have to consider whether whoever took my truck read your file and somehow, for unknown reasons, informed your wife or her lawyer about the contents.”

“Wait a minute. How’d you find out they know about Ali?”

“I got a fax in my office just a short time ago.”

“You think this has something to do with your lost files?”

“I just don’t know. It’s suspicious. On the other hand, they could have known about her for some time and waited until the last minute to spring it on us.”

“But how else-” Kevin stopped. “Is she going to testify?”

“Yes. She’s been subpoenaed. She may be here today.”

“Then they knew about her yesterday, right? Before your files were gone.”

“Possibly. But it’s also possible they got her in on very short notice.”