Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unfit to Practice

“I see,” Paul said. He checked her face again. Was she truly eighteen, or some hard-nosed mama of forty?

Ali did that smile again, the smile with the eyebrows up that made a sort of facial shrug. “Yeah,” she said, “that’s how close I came. But then when I went to bed I couldn’t sleep. I thought stuff like, we don’t have any money, how do we get to Alaska? And I don’t like doing dishes or anything, so do I want to take care of kids? All of a sudden, you know, this lightning bolt hit me and I fell out of love. Like this.” She snapped her fingers. “All of a sudden I couldn’t understand what I ever liked about Kevin.

“He has no ambition. He’s actually kind of passive except when it comes to his kids. The truth is that I initiated everything. He liked being dragged along. And the sex was good but he was only my second boyfriend and there was this cute exchange student from Sofia-that’s in Bulgaria, in case you were wondering-at school who I was starting to think about, like, you know, what a shame. He’s soulful. He wants to be a writer. You know?”

“I know.” He thought back to a beautiful artist he knew once.

She shook her head wonderingly. “I felt like I had been sick with flu and just suddenly got over it. I searched my soul that night and I realized I didn’t want to go to Alaska. I knew it was over. Has that ever happened to you?”

“Not since I was seventeen,” Paul said.

“Are you saying I’m immature? Because-”

“No, no. I have no problem with that.”

This magic sentence always worked. Ali’s defensiveness dissolved and she said with a trace of boastfulness, “So that was my love affair. Is that all you wanted to ask me about?”

“Not exactly. Although you have been very frank and helpful.”

She nodded and said, “Anything I can do.”

“What I need to know is how you ended up getting subpoenaed.”

“I explained that to Kevin when he called. And incidentally, tell him not to call again. I’m with somebody else.”

And I bet that somebody else writes beautiful love letters in Cyrillic script, Paul thought. “Explain it to me one more time.”

“Simple. The phone rang last Friday morning about seven. My parents talked to this lawyer named Riesner, Lisa’s lawyer. He told them he’d heard Kevin and I had been involved in a serious sexual relationship. They didn’t believe it at first. It shocked them quite a bit when I admitted it. I hated it coming out that way. I felt bad that I hadn’t told them before on my own, so that wasn’t fun. There was some shouting, you know how it is. Then a little later someone came to the door, a grungy-looking man wearing a wrinkled flowered shirt looking lost. At that point, my parents weren’t in any shape to answer, so I did. He said, ‘Ali Peck?’ I said, ‘How’d you know my name?’ He handed me some papers and I said, ‘Listen, pal, I’m sorry, I already go to the Lutheran church,’ and he said, ‘It’s a subpoena, dollface. Read it and weep.’

“My parents read it and they called their lawyer. He said I was a witness in Kevin’s hearing that same day and he could get the hearing continued if I wanted but eventually I’d have to tell the truth because now Lisa knew. I said I might as well get it over with even though I was plenty nervous. Then I needed to talk with my parents for a long time, explain everything until they understood. After that discussion, my parents said they respected my need to live my own life.”

So sixties, thought Paul.

“So our lawyer talked to Lisa’s lawyer and gave me advice on how to testify and what they were going to ask me. The whole experience was pretty gross. Very embarrassing, but the worst thing was knowing I was hurting Kevin. But I couldn’t lie about the big stuff. That would be perjury.”

Paul made some notes, looked at the healthy radiant girl in blue jeans with the bright future, and said, “Just wondering. Why didn’t you call Kevin before the hearing? A little advance warning. That sort of thing.”

“I had a lot going on! My parents upset. A trig test I might miss. Kevin would have cried, too. He wouldn’t have even thought about my feelings. About how I, an innocent party, got sucked into this ugly custody hearing.” She picked up the ax and ran her finger along the edge.

“This subpoena came as a complete shock to you.”

“Yes. Kevin said Lisa’s lawyer sort of implied that I called him and told him about us. That’s a complete lie.”

Paul closed his notebook. “Just one more little thing I need to go back to, Ali. You said that Lisa Cruz never knew about the affair until the time you were subpoenaed.”

“No one knew. Kevin would never have told her.”

“You’re a woman of the world,” Paul said. “Obviously you’re no fool. Don’t you think Lisa might have figured it out? Maybe from Kevin’s attitude, or his lack of interest in her-”

“She kicked him out of her bed and for some reason expected him to stick by her. She drove him crazy, starting up one manic lifestyle racket after another, then, when it didn’t fix her life or make her happy, she turned off like a run-down battery toy. I really think he tried to make her happy for a long time, but she’s one of those people who’s so self-absorbed, she barely registered him.”

Paul nodded. He stood up just as a Ford Explorer rolled into the driveway. Paul passed the man and woman inside on his way to the Mustang out front. “It’s okay, Mom,” Ali called.

Like their daughter, the Pecks practically vibrated good health, but they looked nervous. He would be, too, if he had Ali for a daughter.

After his visit with Ali, Paul stopped in at the South Lake Tahoe police station to check out the Bronco theft investigation. As soon as he walked into the building, old, familiar sensations assaulted him, which quickly overrode his well-being.

He hadn’t fit into the San Francisco Police Department from the beginning. Following a beer or two, when he felt insightful, he sometimes reflected that the cause of his unease there was not only a generalized problem with granting any idiot authority over him. His problem was also with specific idiots, the officious ones that seemed to have an almost military need to break his spirit and create the right kind of soldier. He irked them. They irked him. And one day, after a series of incidents, rather than granting him yet another promotion in Homicide, he was fired for insubordination.

Now, just over forty, entering what should be his maturity, he still got riled at the signs ordering this and that, the stone-faced officer on duty, the vigilant questions, the general militaristic smell of the place. But he disguised his prejudices, gave a pleasant smile to the cop at the desk, and asked to see one of the officers who had responded to the theft of Nina’s Bronco.

After turning his ID this way and that, as if to make better sense of it from a different angle, the cop said, looking closely at Paul, “Officer Scholl’s on duty,” buzzing the inner sanctum. Officer Scholl came out and asked him to walk her over to her car. She was going off duty now, and was dressed in a red turtleneck sweater over slacks and ankle boots, civilian clothing that flattered her stocky body.

They walked out together into the damp mountain world, where breezes whispered softly, and plump, new, green acorns on a huckleberry oak shrub made the ugliness of human behavior in a place like this so much more difficult to stomach than in any given urban slum.

“There’s nothing to report,” Scholl told him with a frown after he explained his mission.

“Any progress on the missing files?”

“Nope.”

The speed in her step made him rush to keep up. “Things have been happening in these cases that suggest-a possibility that someone is using information from the files.”