The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [12]
“Of course it pisses me off. And I won’t let him get away with it. But I’ve been really careful with this one and I just don’t want the … the appearance of impropriety to fuck up my case.”
“Impropriety? Christ.” Nada’s jaw was tight and the tendons in her neck stuck out like long blades. “He put a beer bottle inside that girl and then wagged a finger in her face and told her she wasn’t old enough to drink—”
“We’re gonna get him.”
“You know your case is weak. And the girl won’t be good on the stand.”
“There’s another witness.”
“You don’t even know where Kerry Meadows is.”
“Jerry will find him. Meadows is a scared twenty-two-year-old trust-fund kid with everything to lose. He’ll start talking the second I point out that if he doesn’t talk, we’ll slap him so hard with an accessory charge that he’ll be having his midlife crisis up at Ely.”
“Yeah, well, I’m a twenty-something trust-fund kid myself. And I say you’re not going to find him if you insist on propriety. These little monsters don’t know shit from propriety, and neither does English Judson.”
“Which is why it will feel good when I put Truman away.”
Nada took a long swallow. Her little body processed alcohol the way an old car absorbs five-weight oil. “Do you know what he called me today?”
“English? No.”
Nada bulged her eyes and puckered her lips and then she whispered it across the room, like a little girl who’s just discovered the word fart.
Bea giggled. “English’s dropped so many C-bombs on me, he oughta have Boeing stenciled on his ass. He even called me that in court once, although not so the judge could hear it. He’s a dinosaur. And a pig. A pigosaurus. Tyrannosaurus pig.” She scooted forward a few inches on the carpet and lowered her voice in case Don was coming down the stairs for another bowl of pretzels. “Look. Garfield has already warned me about my friendship with you. He says your reputation is jeopardizing my cases. My career. I told him it was under control.”
“So you don’t want my help?”
“Yes, I want your help. I want your help picking out birthday presents for my daughter. I want your help tutoring math down at the Learning Center. I want your help drinking good wine. I want you to come with me to artsy girl movies that Don refuses to go see. But I don’t want your help on cases anymore. You understand that, right?”
Nada exhaled. She made a brief face—apprehensive but resigned—like Bea’s daughter would make when she was about to tell Bea about a bad grade on a test. “English broke into my apartment.”
“That’s crazy.” She tried to use the word sparingly with Nada. “You’re obsessed with that guy. English is an asshole lawyer, just like a thousand other asshole lawyers in this town. Nothing else.”
“Someone was in my apartment yesterday. While I was out.”
“Did they take anything?”
Nada paused her glass at her lips and her answer reverberated inside the bowl. “There’s not much to take.”
“Did you call the police?”
“And tell them that I know that my drawers had been opened? That my sliding closet doors had been shut the opposite way than I left them? That someone had lifted a knife from my silverware tray and put it back with the forks? That a few revolutions of toilet paper were missing from the roll?”
Nada could be joyful and funny, even scary, the way she could celebrate the present without regard for the next day or even the next hour. There was hardly an offer, a suggestion, a caper that she ever said no to. Bea once watched her stare at the newspaper for almost fifteen minutes before announcing with a delighted grin that she had finished the crossword in her head. But Nada also possessed a relentless cynicism that sometimes seemed to border on despair. She seemed capable of knowing everything, but Bea was starting to realize that it’s mostly the things a person doesn’t know that make her content. “What makes you think it was English?”