William Lashner - Bitter Truth

I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.

“Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.

She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”

“Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed to do, transcripts to review, briefs to write, discovery to discover. Instead of getting down to work I took the check out of my pocket. Ten thousand dollars. Caroline Shaw. First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. That was a pretty fancy banking address for a punkette with a post in her nose. I stood and strolled into my partner’s office.

She was at her desk, chewing, a pen in one hand and a carrot in the other. Gray-and-white-streaked copies of case opinions, paragraphs highlighted in fluorescent pink, were scattered across her desktop and she stared up at me as if I were a rude interruption.

“What’s up, doc?” Beth Derringer said.

“Want to go for a ride?”

“Sure,” she said as she snapped a chunk of carrot with her teeth. “What for?”

“Credit check.”

“WHERE ARE WE OFF TO?”asked Beth, sitting in the passenger seat of my little Mazda as I negotiated the wilds of the Schuylkill Expressway.

Short and sharp-faced, with glossy black hair ct even and fierce, Elizabeth Derringer had been my partner since we both fell out of law school, all except for one short period a few years back when I lost my way in a case, choosing money over honor, and she felt compelled to resign. That was very much like Beth, to pretend that integrity counted for more than cash, and of all the people I ever met in my life who pretended just that same thing, and there have been far too many, she was the best at pulling it off. Beth was smarter than me, wiser than me, a better lawyer all around, but she had an annoying tendency to pursue causes rather then currency, representing cripples thrown off SSI disability rolls, secretaries whose nipples had been tweaked by Neanderthal superiors, deadbeats looking to stave off foreclosure of the family homestead. It was my criminal work that kept us solvent, but I liked to think that Beth’s unprofitable good deeds justified my profitable descent into the mire with my bad boy clients. In today’s predatory legal world I would have been well advised to jettison her income drag, except I never would. I knew I could trust Beth more deeply than I could trust anyone else in this world, which was not a bad recipe, actually, for a partner and which explained why I hitched my shingle to hers but not why she hitched hers to mine. That I still hadn’t figured out.

“I found us a new client,” I said. “I want to see if the retainer check clears.”

“You smell like a chimney.”

“This new client is a bit nervous.”

“Why don’t you just have Morris do a background check for you?” she said, referring to Morris Kapustin, our usual private detective.

“This isn’t big enough yet to bring in Morris.”

A brown Chevette cut in front of me on the expressway and I slammed my horn. The guy in the Chevette swung around into a different lane and slowed to give me the finger. I gestured back. He shouted something and I shouted something and we jawed at each other for a few moments, neither hearing a word of what the other was yelling, before he sped away.

“So tell me about the new client. Who is he?”

“ She is Caroline Shaw. Her sister, one Jacqueline Shaw, killed herself, apparently. Caroline doesn’t believe it was a suicide. She suspects one of my clients and wants me to investigate. I’m certain it’s nothing more than what it looks like but I figure I can keep her out of trouble if I can convince her. My clients don’t like being accused of murder.”

“That’s rather noble of you.”

“She gave us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer.”

“I should have figured.”

“Even nobility has a price. You know what knight-hoods go for these days?”

A maroon van started sliding out of its lane, inching closer and closer to the side of my car. I pressed my horn and accelerated away from the van, braking just in time to avoid a Cadillac, before veering into the center lane.

“It’s not the sort of thing you usually take up, Victor. I didn’t know you had an investigator’s license.”

“She paid us a ten-thousand-dollar retainer, Beth. If the check clears, I’ll buy a belted raincoat and turn into Philip Marlowe.”

The First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line was a surprising choice for Caroline Shaw’s checking account. It was a stately white-shoe bank with three discreet offices and a huge estates department to handle the peculiar bequests of the wealthy dead. The bank’s jumbo mortgage rates were surprisingly low, the rich watched every penny with a rapaciousness that would stun, but the bank’s credit checks were vicious, kicking out all but those with the littlest need for the institution’s money. It catered to the very wealthy suburban crowd who didn’t want to deal with the hoi polloi when they dug their paws into their piles of gold and laughed. The bank didn’t discriminate against the not very rich, of course, but keep just a few hundred dollars in a checking account at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the fees would wipe out your principal in a breathtakingly short time. Keep a few hundred thousand and your Yves St. Laurent designer checks were complimentary. Wood-paneled offices, tellers in Brooks Brothers suits, personal banking, ads in The Wall Street Journal proclaiming the soundness of their investment advice for portfolios of two million dollars or more. Sorry, no, they didn’t cash welfare checks at the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line and the glass door was always locked so that they could bar your entry until they gave you the once-over, as if they were selling diamond tiaras.

Even though I was in a suit, and Beth was in a nice print dress, we had to knock twice and smile gamely before we heard the buzz.

“Yes, can I help you?” said a somberly dressed young man with a thin smile who greeted us as soon as we stepped inside. I guessed he was some sort of a concierge, there to take the rich old ladies’ coats and escort them to the tapestry chairs arranged before willing and obsequious personal bankers.

“We need to cash a check,” I said.

“Do either of you have an account here?”

I looked around at the portraits of old bankers tacked onto the dark walnut of the walls, gray-haired men in their frock coats staring solemnly down at me with disapproval. Even if I was a Rothschild I don’t think I would have felt comfortable in that bank and, believe me, I was no Rothschild.

“No,” I said. “No account.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t cash checks for those without accounts here.” He whispered so as not to embarrass us, which was very considerate of him, considering. “There is a Core States Bank branch down the road a bit, I’m sure they could be of assistance.”

“We’re being sloughed off,” said Beth.