Lisa Scottoline - Legal Tender

I adjusted my sunglasses and was about to swim against the tide when an older woman, caught in the crowd, got knocked off-balance. “Oh, my!” she yelped and she tumbled right into my arms.

The crowd flowed around us, apathetic as trout. I was the fugitive, my job was to run, but I had an armful of old lady.

“My back, my back! Please help me, it went out,” she said.

“Okay, it’s all right.” I eased her to the wall of the building and out of the foot traffic. She felt as frail as my mother, brittle bones in a thin sack of skin.

“My back, I need to lie down. Please.” Her face was etched with pain, so I squatted against the granite wall and eased her head onto my tight skirt. Her pink uniform smock saidMAINTENANCE in a patch sewn over her breast, but she had no nametag. In a world of nametags, the people who clean up after us remain nameless.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Eloise,” she said with difficulty. “It hurts, my back.” Her forehead was damp at her hairline, a steely gray, and her hand clutched at my jacket sleeve. For lack of anything better to do, I got down on my knees and cradled her, a lawyerly Pietà.

Suddenly there was a disturbance at the far side of the crowd. Noises out front, on the street, then shouting. The crowd burst into excited chatter and edged back towards the old woman.

“Hey!” I shouted, and bonked a man in the calf.

Out of nowhere came a blast of police sirens, not ten feet from where I crouched. My heart began to pound. Brakes screeched at the curbside. Tires squealed. Orders were barked. Were they after me? I couldn’t see anything but a gaggle of wingtips and black nylon socks. What was going on?

The crowd pressed dangerously back toward us. I cradled Eloise, as much for my comfort as for hers. Between the ankles and feet, I could see the white flash of a squad car streaking to the curb, then another. Uniformed cops were hustling from the cars. Leaping out of the first one, his tie flying, was Detective Azzic.

Jesus. I felt a bolt of fear. My instinct was to run. I felt it in my feet, in every muscle in my legs. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream, telling my body to fly. Go, run. Take off.

“My back, it hurts.” Eloise groaned. “It hurts so bad.”

What about Eloise? I couldn’t leave her on the pavement, she’d be trampled, and if I got up and ran now, they’d nab me for sure. No. Stay put. The crowd would screen me from the cops. I ducked lower so they wouldn’t see my face.

Then it hit me. It wasn’t me they were after. It was Grady, and there was nothing I could do about it.

In the next instant, a phalanx of uniformed cops hustled from the office building. In the middle, taller than most of them, was a stoic Grady. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and the cops yanked him along by his elbows. I felt a wrench of pain at the sight. One of the cops dangled his backpack by a strap. They shoved him into the back of the squad car, and Azzic climbed into the passenger seat in front.

“On your way, people,” said one of the cops, dispersing the mob. “There’s nothing to see, nothing to see.”

Eloise squinted up at me. “Keep your head down, honey. They’ll be gone in a minute.”

Ten minutes later I had my co-conspirator on her feet and was hustling in spike heels down Chestnut Street, trying to blend in with the lunchtime crowd. I looked everywhere behind my sunglasses, eyes sweeping right and left. Only public transportation and cops were allowed to drive on Chestnut Street, making the police cars easy to spot. None were around, but I was still uneasy. I couldn’t believe how fast they’d materialized at the library. They must have been tailing Grady. Maybe they were tailing me right now. My gut tensed. I hobbled along with the flow on the sidewalk, my thoughts churning.

So Grady had been arrested, undoubtedly as an accessory after the fact. Either Azzic had traced the bananamobile to him, or wasn’t worried if he could make the charge stick and wanted to increase the pressure on me. He would ruin a terrific lawyer in the process, and it was way too close for comfort. They were closing in.

I picked up the pace as best I could, fighting the panic rising in my chest, constricting my throat. I thought of the Eileen tapes. How long before Celeste discovered they were missing? Eileen’s folder had been near the top on his desk. It had to be the hottest thing going for him right now. How long before he reported it to the police? How long before Azzic realized I had something to do with it? I was running out of time. The guard would remember my disguise, no problem. Pliers? Christ.

“Hey, baby,” said a voice at my arm, and I jumped. “How you doin’?” It was a short man with tattoos, and he was leering at me. “You wanna spend some time with a real man, baby?”

Then I remembered what I looked like. An oversized hooker who couldn’t walk in heels. “I am a real man, handsome. Now beat it.”

I wobbled ahead. There were fewer and fewer people on the sidewalk. The bus traffic had thinned out. Everybody was going back to work, leaving me feeling exposed. I needed to hide, but I still couldn’t risk going uptown to the basement. I needed to get off the street before another tattoo stopped me.

A bus steamed by in a cloud of sooty smoke and braked with a hydraulic squeal at the corner stop. Perfect. Go. I hustled across the street, grabbed the bus, and fed the machine my fare with a shaking hand. The bus lurched forward, and I groped for the slippery pole, eyeing the riders. There were no cops on board and the faces in the padded seats looked comfortably blank, many plugged into radio earphones. No one seemed to recognize me.

I made my way to the back of the bus and took a seat in the last row, which was empty except for a teenager on the far right in a Raiders shirt. I sat down in the back row, scooted way over against the greasy window on the far left, and willed myself to calm down. Breathe easily, normally. I wiped my damp brow under my sunglasses. I couldn’t stop thinking about Grady. Where was he now? In a holding cell? Had he called a lawyer? Who? I couldn’t help him or me, except to solve this damn thing.

I fished in my purse and unpacked the Casio cassette player Grady had had in his backpack. He said it would free me from the library and he’d been right. I tried not to worry about him as I unwrapped the long wire, slipped in a cassette of Eileen unplugged, and pressed the itsy-bitsy black earphones into my ears. Now I looked just like the other people on the bus.

I pushed thePLAY button.

Q: Where was this lawyer?

A: At a clinic. I didn’t have to pay.

Q: See, you get what you pay for.

A: But it was the courts, not the lawyer. The lawyers there, they were good.

Q: So tell me about your next boyfriend.

A: That would be Deron.

Q: (laughing) Deron, huh? A nice Jewish boy.

I listened to this kind of crap for the next four hours, riding around my hometown in circles. Down Chestnut Street, over on Sixth, then up Walnut, all the way to West Philly and back again. The Raiders fan stayed on the bus for two round-trips and he wasn’t the only person riding aimlessly, maybe because the bus was air-conditioned. During that time, the back row filled in and emptied out. Riders came and went. Nobody spoke to me or even gave me a second glance.

The day turned to an overcast evening, the tapes ran to their end, and no other clues announced themselves during Eileen’s inane interviews. If anything, the tapes were more significant for what they didn’t say. Eileen barely mentioned Bill Kleeb, he was a footnote to her fascinating life story, and there was no mention of any drug use, or of Sam. On the last tape, a jailhouse interview, she told the fabricated story of the CEO’s murder as if she had been my dupe, the pawn of a crazed radical lawyer. I could only shake my head. We used to give jail time to frauds like Eileen, now we gave them book deals.