The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [11]
When he exited the LSD at Fullerton, he was minutes away from a horrible, fateful meeting in Solomon’s graystone on the park.
A decade later, after he stepped behind the podium on West Division to enthusiastic applause, Reggie gestured once at the crowd with his good arm and bowed his head respectfully to the dead man’s widow and told the audience how much Solomon Gold had treasured Chicago, the city where he had been born, educated, unjustly tried, and tragically murdered.
He told them the work of the Gold Foundation was just a small example of the limitless good that can take root in the barren soil of senseless tragedies like the killings of Erica Liu and of the great composer whose name was being affixed to this building today.
Then Reggie Vallentine, the man who had murdered Solomon Gold, touched the old wound in his right shoulder and told them they were all blessed.
5
“ENGLISH SPOTTED ME. He’s a smart little bastard.”
Shins folded under her thighs, body straight and stone-still atop Beatrice Beaujon’s overstuffed couch, tiny Nada looked almost like origami—delicate, angular, precise. Hair back in a ponytail, she wore jeans and an extra-small gray T-shirt silk-screened with a curvaceous mud-flap silhouette. For long stretches of time, her giant green eyes were the only parts of her that moved. If you were walking quickly through the room, you could almost mistake her for a cat, Bea thought.
It was close to 9:00 p.m., but there was just enough light coming through the sliding glass doors to expose the furnished red deck and the swimming pool beyond it. Bea and Donald Beaujon were both attorneys, but the pool and the big house and the mismatched Beamers in the garage were products of Don’s partner salary. The mahogany deck all by itself had cost as much as Clark County paid Beatrice in a year.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Bea said, an involuntary and unhelpful laugh punctuating the end of the sentence. What Nada had done was outlandishly stupid, and yet typical at the same time. “Goddammit, Nada, you’re going to get me fired. Maybe sanctioned, if I’m lucky. Worst case, Phillip Truman gets a new trial because English convinces the judge I sent you to spy on the two of them.” She handed Nada a generous goblet of Shiraz and lowered herself to the floor, resting her own glass on the factory-distressed coffee table between them.
“Relax. Did they make it illegal for me to sit down in a nice restaurant now?”
Bea had changed into jeans and removed her jacket, but she still wore the white cotton blouse—now untucked and loosened at the collar—she had worn earlier to court. “Do you really expect anyone, especially a Las Vegas judge, to believe you just happened to be sucking down six-dollar Diet Cokes at Le Papillon when a kid I’m prosecuting for sexual assault was eating there with his attorney? And English Judson, of all people?”
Nada twisted her lips into something that was half pout and half grin. More than a year ago, when Nada was still drawing an occasional freelance paycheck as a consultant for the Clark County DA’s office, English Judson had found an excuse to call Nada as a hostile witness in the assault trial of a city council member. His examination of her, in which he managed to sneak in a cheap reference to her notorious father, was the beginning of the end of Nada’s snooping in the hallways of the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas. The end of the end came when a casino camera caught her paying a little too much attention to the cards.
Bea had barely escaped the taint of the double scandal.
Nada’s hair began to free itself of the elastic band and long brownish red bangs now slipped across her forehead one strand at a time. “Truman’s guilty as hell and he’s going to buy his way out of it with his father’s cash.