Lisa Scottoline - Legal Tender

I plopped onto the skinny cot next to my stuff and forced my brain to come up with a next step. I was almost safe, and exhaustion sneaked up on me as my tension ebbed. I slumped over, resting my eyes. I felt myself drifting and almost began to doze. I checked my watch: 6:15. Whatever morning shift there was would be in any minute. I couldn’t sleep now, I had to move on.

I imagined I was on the river, rowing. A sleek tan scull slicing a streak through a smooth blue river, running through the bright sunshine. I was exhausted, but pumping away still. Power-stroking toward the finish line. Rowing had taught me that when you thought your last reserve was depleted, you had another ten strokes left. Energy to spare. All you had to do was summon it up. Insist.

I stood up and stretched. I was groggy, disoriented, and exhausted. I figured that my mother’s next treatment would be today, but it was too risky to show up at the hospital. I’d have to leave her in Hattie’s hands.

I crossed to the scuzzy sink and washed the shit off my face with a desiccated bar of Lava soap. I shampooed my hair and dried it with paper towels. Then I redid my makeup, hid my clothes in a filthy corner under the cot, and did what everybody else does on Monday morning in America.

I got dressed for work.

The office building was on the other side of town from the Silver Bullet, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Its tiny lobby smelled of stale cigar smoke and the pitted floor felt gritty under my new spike heels. A cheap white-letters-on-black office directory revealed only three tenants in the low-rise:LAW OFFICES OF VICTOR CELESTE, ESQUIRE; CELESTE LAND HOLDINGS; AND CELESTIAL ENTERPRISES, INC.

There was nothing else in the lobby except a grayish standard-issue desk, located in front of the elevator bank. An aged security guard hunched over the desk, studying the sports page as he fingered his ear, which barely held an oversized plastic hearing aid. A cigarette hung between his lips. It almost dropped out of his mouth when he saw me.

“Good mornin’, Miss,” he said, blinking as he took in my white silk tank top and black leather suit, whose skirt I’d rolled to an obscene length and paired with seamed black stockings. The personal shopper had promised “happening,” which I now understood to mean tarty. So I’d completed the ensemble with my black sunglasses, a helmet of newly red hair, and a slash of the reddest lipstick sample at the drugstore counter. I was hoping I looked like a professional call girl and not an amateur secret agent.

“Good morning to you, too, sir,” I purred, sashaying past him as if he had no right to stop me.

“Eh, Miss, wait. Wait. Please.”

“Did you want me, sir?” I pivoted on my spikes and smiled suggestively. Or what I hoped was suggestive and not merely dyspeptic. I tried to recall the serial screen hookers I’d seen in movies, Hollywood having presented so many positive images of successful businesswomen.

“Miss… do you have an appointment or somethin’? I have to know before I let you through.”

“My name is Linda. I’m a friend of Mister Celeste’s. A personal friend, if you understand my meaning.” I struck a Julia Roberts pose, hand on hip.

“Just Linda?” he asked, leaning forward in his creaky chair. I couldn’t tell if he was becoming aroused or just couldn’t hear.

“Linda, that’s all. That’s all Mister Celeste calls me, and that’s all I am. Linda.”

The old man stubbed out his cigarette. “Eh, Mr. Celeste isn’t in yet. Nobody’s in yet.”

“I know. I’m supposed to get here before Mister Celeste does. He wanted me to get everything ready for him, the way he likes it.” I waved my new black handbag in the air, as if no further explanation were required. Meanwhile, it contained a cell phone and three crumpled Tampax. Party time.

“Oh. Oh, I see,” he said, and coughed nervously. “How are you gonna get in his office? I don’t have a key.”

“Mister Celeste gave me one, of course.” I held up my Grun key. “His law office is on the first floor, is it not?” A touch of Judy Holliday, for nostalgia.

“Yeh, but how do I know you’re not gonna rob him?” the guard asked, only half joking.

“Do I look like a thief?” I pouted. All Marilyn. If she were tall as a house.

“Eh, no, not at all. But, I mean, I never seen you-”

“That’s because Mister Celeste always comes to me. ” I swiveled around and punched the greasy button for the up elevator, street-smart as Jane Fonda in Klute. Bree, that’s me.

“I don’t know about this,” the old guard fretted, rising slowly from behind the desk. “Mr. Celeste didn’t tell me you had an appointment with him this morning.” He shuffled to the elevator bank and faced me.

“Well, if I don’t get up there and get everything ready, you’ll have to explain to Mister Celeste why I wasn’t there like he said.” The elevator arrived with a tubercular ding and the doors rattled open. I scurried inside and hit the button.

“Wait a minute, Miss. Linda. I can’t leave my post.” The doors began to slide closed, but the guard stuck his veined hands between them and struggled to push them apart. I gasped, alarmed. This was more vigilance than I bargained for. I didn’t want to see his hands crushed.

“Let me go, please! Mister Celeste will be real mad if I don’t show! He’s countin’ on me. He told me, it was real important!”

“Press theOPEN button!” he shouted, pulling the doors apart like Spartacus in retirement. The gap between them began to widen, and I punched theCLOSE button frantically. Suddenly the elevator started to sound a deafening, continuous beep.

BBBBBEEEEEEEPPPP!

“When Mister Celeste gets disappointed, boy, does he have a temper! He’s got a big gun, too! Did you know that?”

BBBBBEEEEEEEEPPPPPPPPP!

“A what?” the guard yelled.

BBBBBBBBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEPPPP!

The decibel level apparently wreaked havoc with his hearing aid, because the guard took one of his hands off the door and covered his bad ear. The elevator doors struggled to close. The gap narrowed. The guard’s fingertips turned white.

“Mister Celeste has a gun!”

BEEP!

I stood before an old-fashioned office door, a wooden frame with starry frosted glass, figuring out how to get inside. I was a worse sleuth than I was a hooker. A graduate of the crossing-that-bridge-when-we-come-to-it school of detection. What could I pick the lock with? I didn’t have a bobby pin, they went out with pincurls. I jiggled the lock with the junk on my keychain; first my apartment key, then with my plastic-encased doggie picture. Both were spectacularly unsuccessful.

Fuck this. I checked the hall again, took off my spike heel, and broke the glass window with it. The patent pump as burglar’s tool. I slipped my shoe back on and was inside in a flash.

The door opened onto a minuscule waiting room. A plastic rhododendron gathered dust in the corner. There was a worn cloth couch and a boxy old computer on the secretary’s desk. Strictly low-tech, and I wasn’t surprised. Lawyers like Celeste avoided writing anything, it took too much time. But their fee agreements they had printed by the ream and they took 40 percent. I crossed the waiting room to Celeste’s office.

It was a piker’s law office and they’re all alike. A grandiose desk arranged against a cheap paneled wall and manila files scattered everywhere. Bookshelves that contained law textbooks left over from law school, outdated and untouched because the telephone was the only thing that mattered. Celeste’s would be a high-volume practice built on slip-and-falls, ersatz workmen’s comp injuries, and exploding Coke bottles. Turning chronic sickness into a healthy living. Until Eileen Jennings came along, and Celeste figured he’d make a killing.