Perri O'Shaughnessy - Unfit to Practice

“Did you know she would leave again?” Wish said. “Who are you really, Mr. Psychic Hotline?”

“I didn’t know.” Paul started up his car and flipped it into gear. “I just didn’t know how we were going to get her alone. I thought we might have to wait until she left for somewhere in the morning.” They drove down the hill, well behind the blue Saturn. “This is good. I like the darkness.”

“Now you’re really scaring me,” Wish said. “Okay, I give up. Where is she going in the middle of the night? Only place I can think of is the casinos, but here we are going the other way, west.”

“I have an idea,” Paul said. He didn’t like the idea, but it was borne out soon enough, when the blue Saturn parked a few doors down from the Guillaume residence.

“Isn’t that where Angel lives?” Wish asked. “But I don’t understand. If she’s going to see Angel and Brandy, she better hit the road for San Francisco, because I happen to know they stayed there tonight.”

She got out of the car and unlocked the trunk, pulling something heavy out. She approached Angel’s house, unscrewing the lid of what appeared to be a fairly large can. At the edge of the house she stopped and listened, then moved closer and peered quite methodically through windows. All windows dark. No car in the carport. Quiet fir trees, a dark Tahoe night. Stopping at the back corner of the house, she wadded a piece of paper around a rock and hurled it through a kitchen windowpane. Then she tipped the can.

Paul and Wish grabbed her. For a small person, she fought big. After landing a light punch to Paul’s sternum, forcing him to stop breathing momentarily, she dropped the can on the ground. Wish sneaked up behind and pinned her while she scrambled for it.

“Out of gas?” Paul asked. “Let us help you with that.” He swooped down and wrenched the can from her grasp. “That’s strange. It’s full.”

“Who the hell are you?” she asked, keeping her voice to a guilty whisper. “I’ll scream for the cops! You can’t do this to me!”

Paul showed her his identification and introduced Wish. He explained who they were. “Want me to make that call for you?” he asked.

She hung her head.

“Seems to me, you owe us an explanation. What was your plan here?” Paul asked. “I have to say, it doesn’t look well conceived.”

“I wasn’t going to burn the house down. I just wanted to show them I meant business. I was only going to burn a little.”

“Well, take your pick,” Paul said. “The police or us for company.” He explained who they were and that they were working for Nina Reilly in a hearing only distantly related to Cody’s case.

“Don’t call the cops, please. It was just insurance,” she said. “Something serious to scare them off so they wouldn’t want to testify in Cody’s case when it comes up!”

“You ought to be ashamed,” Wish said.

“There was nobody home.”

Paul sent Wish through the window to retrieve the rock. “Reach inside to unlock it. It should be easy to open now.”

Wish came out complaining, sucking on a tiny cut on his finger. He handed the uncrumpled note to Paul, and the rock, which Paul stuck into a paper bag under the seat of his car.

“Testify in the Stinson case and you’ll see some real damage done,” the printed note said.

“What is your relationship with Cody Stinson?” Paul asked, pocketing the note.

“Old friends.”

“Nothing more?”

Silence.

“I understand you two were close once but he left you for Phoebe. That must have been a shock.”

Carol said slowly, “Yeah. It was.”

“You’ve been a good friend to him, Carol, considering he dumped you. Giving him that fake alibi.”

“I wish I hadn’t.” She pushed back some loose hair, and Paul saw water forming in her eyes. “Aw, shit! This has been the worst nightmare!”

Paul didn’t ask her any more. Nina had a plan, and he would stick with it, and that involved getting Carol Ames to the California State Bar hearing tomorrow.

So Paul blackmailed her into joining him for the long haul all the way back to San Francisco. No police, just a long midnight ramble.

The night passed in a blur of black trees, moonlight, and splashed puddles. After dropping Wish at home so that he could get to his classes the next day and allowing Carol Ames to pick up her bag from Kelly’s sister’s house, they hit Highway 50 and started the long descent to the flats.

Carol, who asked to be called Carol and “not Ms. Freaking Ames,” asked Paul some questions: Would Cody be there, who else might be there. He told her Cody would be there but Brandy and Angel would not, lies. As for what she would be expected to do, well, Paul told her, she would tell what happened that night. Now that everyone knew Cody had been at the campground and she couldn’t provide her old friend a real alibi, she had to tell that to the court to back him up, further nonsense, but he was tired and couldn’t come up with a better story.

Fortunately, she, too, was tired, apparently too tired to dispute his illogic, and of course she really didn’t want him talking to the police or anyone else about her little excursion through the trees with a gas can in the night. In spite of it being the middle of the night, she couldn’t shut up. “Oh, hell,” she said at intervals, and “Oh, God. I can’t believe this is happening after all these months. I can’t take it.”

In Placerville she finally fell asleep, mouth open, taking breaths in soft little gasps. She awoke frequently, jarred loose by any jump of the car or noise on the road. By the time they hit the Oakland Bay Bridge, dawn was at the Mustang’s hoofs.

Paul turned the radio to KQED, counting on news to keep him awake and correctly positioned in the middle lane. When that didn’t work and he almost took out a black Jaguar, he tuned in to AM radio where the blaring ads did the job. They also woke Carol again, who rummaged in her bag for a brush and asked for an immediate pit stop. In the city, they located a diner on Mission with spacious accommodations. She emerged from the rest room briskly, wearing a ton of eyeliner, not that it helped.

He was very tired, and that made him mean. She looked haggard and her peculiar hairdo didn’t help. “You look nice,” he said to counteract his thoughts, thinking, in fact, she looked more like how he felt, as if ragged fingernails were scratching at his pupils. She smiled at the compliment, which made him feel even more degenerate. But he wanted her to feel good. He bought a Chronicle, which they split, and eggs, which they ate in relative peace.

When the time came, they walked the few blocks over to Howard Street and rode up the elevator to the sixth floor.

Nina had not wanted him to confront Carol in any way. She had asked him to bring her to the court and conduct a simple test: Escort Carol into the presence of Angel and Brandy without Carol knowing Brandy and Angel would be there.

“Why not just show Brandy and Angel a photograph of her?” Paul had asked.

“It’s too late for that, even if I had one. If she was there that night, I want her to tell the bar court what she saw, what she knows. If she can back up Cody Stinson’s story that he’s innocent, which I suspect she can, we can prove to the court that he had no reason to attack Brandy, Angel, or Bruce, and that the loss of my file was not damaging in that case. And because of all this, Mario’s out of jail. Maybe they need to arrest him again before he disappears.”

He liked her theory, which fit into his philosophy of successful investigation, demanding equal sprinkles of wishful thinking and genuine possibility. He was only sorry she had not put him on to it during the past six dry-as-dust months.