William Lashner - Falls The Shadow

“I saw you speaking to Velma Wykowski.”

“Wykowski, huh?”

“That was her name when she roamed about the city like a feral goat. What business could you have with a woman like her?”

“Whatever it is, it’s my business,” I said.

Mrs. Cullen let out a perfect middle-class humph. “She’s a molten one, isn’t she? Warming to look at, but dangerous to the touch. You know, she was with him first.”

“With whom?”

“Your client. But he wasn’t rich enough for her tastes, so the tramp tossed him and his toys to my Leesa.”

“Toys? What toys?”

“It’s not important. What is important is that she sent him my daughter’s way. I’ll never forgive her that.”

“Velma seems to have genuinely cared for your daughter.”

“Not enough to keep Leesa away from the French snake who became her husband. He’s a bad man, a charmer to be sure, but bad. A man can be a snake and a charmer both. He charmed my daughter, yes, but all the time I knew. I told her so, but Leesa wasn’t one to listen. So, against our best judgments, we gave him our daughter, and look what happened. I knew it, from the first. I could see the darkness in him.”

“And what does that look like, Mrs. Cullen,” I said, “the darkness in a man?”

She took a step closer, grabbed the fabric of my sleeve. “A flash of light where there should be none. Look in his left eye, Mr. Carl. It is there to be seen.”

“The flaw in his eye?”

“A sign.”

“But that doesn’t mean he murdered her.”

She let go of my arm, turned toward the courtroom door. “Maybe not, but it means he had it in him.”

Funny, I thought, that was exactly the way I felt about François Dubé, too. Except that wasn’t what he was on trial for. Sometimes I had to remind myself of why I ended up a criminal defense attorney. It wasn’t the money, really, because, truth be told, I wasn’t making enough, and it wasn’t because I believed that my clients were ultimately good souls wrongly accused, because generally they were neither good nor innocent, they were a bad lot, and François Dubé might just have been one of the worst. No, the root reason I was a criminal defense attorney was that I was always most comfortable on the side of the guy everybody else was against.

“You can be assured,” I said, “that Ms. Dalton, who will be prosecuting the case, is a highly competent trial attorney. If there is enough evidence to convict Mr. Dubé again, she will get it done. My job is just to make sure that the trial is fair.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. Carl. I know what your job is. Your job is to disseminate the perjuries he gives you, to make the truthful look false, to spread doubt like a farmer spreads manure.”

“We all need to have faith in the system, Mrs. Cullen.”

She lowered her head so that she was peering angrily at me from beneath her brow. “That’s not where my faith lies.”

There was something interesting in the malevolence she aimed at me just then. “If you can see darkness in François Dubé, what do you see when you look at me?”

She took a step forward, reached out a hand as if pulling a message from my soul. “I see something missing, is what I see.”

“Any idea what?”

“Well, for starters,” she said, a smile breaking out on her face, “a tooth.”

I gave her a small laugh, nodded, and started toward the door, but before I got past, she grabbed my arm again.

“He’s a charmer, like I said, and a snake, too, Mr. Carl. You should be on alert for who he’s charming now.”

It was sort of creepy, my hallway discussion with Mrs. Cullen, which might explain the strange image I carried in my head when I opened the door to the courtroom. In fact, I almost expected to see in the courtroom a giant cobra with a flaw in its eye, waving back and forth as it rose out of its basket, itself wearing the turban, itself playing the pipe, not itself subject to the beck of a charmer but looking to do some dark charming of its own.

What I saw instead was François Dubé, standing at the defense table, a sheriff with one hand on François’s shoulder, his other hand on François’s arm, about to step François back and take him off to prison. But François wasn’t looking at the sheriff, no. The sheriff was behind, and François was looking forward, directly into the eyes of my partner, Beth. He was holding her hands and gazing into her eyes, and speaking as calmly and softly as a hypnotist.

And my partner, Beth, God help her, was looking back and listening both and seeming to fall ever deeper under his spell.

I suppose at this point I need to recount the first of my visits to Dr. Bob. Remember I mentioned gratuitous violence?

“Uh-oh,” said Dr. Pfeffer cheerily as he peered into my mouth. “I see an abscess. And that’s not the bad news.”

With his hands still in my mouth, I replied, “Arruuuarrheearrgh.”

“It’s cracked, you see,” said Dr. Bob. “Your lower-right first molar. This one there.”

He gave it a tap with one of his instruments and I tried to kick out the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

“It must have been the gun across your jaw that broke it. The crack is what’s causing the abscess, bacteria crawling like hungry spiders down the gap until they find a cozy home in your gums. I would love to save it, nothing I like better than a good endodontic procedure, but what can I do with a cracked root? Out it must come.” He gave a pickpocket’s giggle when he said this last part, delighted by the possibility of separating my tooth from my mouth. “Is that okay with you, Victor?”

“No chance to keep it?”

“On a chain around your neck, possibly,” said Dr. Bob, “but not in your mouth.”

“What about the gap?”

“Oh, we’ll take care of that, don’t you worry.”

“Too late.”

He pulled back, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “Do you want us to get another opinion? I could ask Tilda, but she usually agrees with me.”

He laughed, that car-alarm laugh. I glared.

“Really, Victor, don’t look so worried. It’s all quite routine, and there really is no choice.”

“I suppose if you say there’s no choice.”

“That’s right, Victor. We all must do what we must do.”

“Okay, then.”

“Good. Great. Yes. And there is no reason to wait, is there? No time like the present to take control of a situation. Lucky for you I have a hole in my schedule.”

“Lucky for me.”

“Let me call in Tilda, and we’ll begin.”

Almost immediately the massive figure of Dr. Bob’s hygienist appeared in the doorway, like some dental Valkyrie sent down to gather in my mortally wounded tooth. Behind me I could hear the unnerving clank of metal, the fitting of fixings, the ominous taps as a syringe was filled.

When all his preparations were complete, Dr. Bob gave a nod. Tilda leaned over me and gripped each of my biceps with her huge hands. Her woody scent covered me like a blanket.

“This part won’t hurt much,” said Dr. Bob. “You’ll only feel a little pinprick.”

He jabbed a sliver of metal deep into my gum and jabbed it again and then again as I writhed beneath him on the examination chair and my gum and lip turned to slack, lifeless rubber.

“Calm down,” said Tilda as she pressed my arms hard into the chair and smothered my upper body with her chest. “Don’t be such a silly man, ja . This is the easy part.”

Dr. Bob, in the middle of my extraction, was in the middle of a story, and neither was going well.

The story was about a farm family in Colombia, whom he had happened to meet while doing volunteer dental work in Bogotá. The daughter was a beautiful fourteen-year-old who had caught the eye of a local drug lord. The drug lord had demanded that the family deliver the girl up to him when she turned fifteen. The father had complained, the drug lord had shown little patience for complaints, the father came to Dr. Bob because half his teeth had been knocked out by a baseball bat.