Blood Orange (38 page)

Pork was the only cure for what sickened David. After the
scene with Dana, he went back to the office, gathered his papers together, and went to court, where Gracie said he argued brilliantly on behalf of a seventeen-year-old boy being tried as an adult
accused of assault and battery by an old man with faulty eyesight
and a distrust of any non-white below the age of seventy-five. David
barely remembered his words to the jury.

It was the kind of case he could put his heart into. The boy was
not too smart, not too cunning, and not mean enough to be guilty. If
the criminal justice system got him, he would be lost forever. This
was why David had become a defense attorney, to make sure boys
like this did not get railroaded into jail and have their lives ruined.

The jury was out just over an hour before returning a not-guilty
verdict. On the walk back to the office, for about fifteen minutes, he
felt right with the world. Then he thought of calling Dana to report
his success, and the world caved in on him. He closed himself behind his office door and sorted through his messages. Three from
Dana, which he threw away. Nothing from Peluso.

That night he bought an expensive dinner at Morton’s Steak House and indulged in a one-hundred-and-twenty-dollar bottle of
Merlot. If Dana could have Guadalupe eight days a week, he deserved a good meal when he wanted one. He sat in a booth alone,
the day’s copy of the San Diego Transcript propped in front of him
as camouflage. While he ate and pretended to read the front page,
he watched the women at the bar in their short skirts and fuck-me
stiletto heels, the muscles of their calves outlined like diagrams in an
anatomy textbook. He could have almost any one of them. The
blonde in the red silk suit and diamond ear studs-he had only to
stand at the bar, engage her in conversation, and let slip that he was
David Cabot. It would be so easy, it wasn’t worth doing. He did not
want to wake up in a strange bed looking at someone whose name
he could not remember. He wanted to be with Dana the way it was
before and never would be again.

He couldn’t digest his steak and left half of it on the plate. He
left the restaurant and went into a sports bar. Watching the end of
the Monday-night matchup, for the first time in many years he
wished he were still a quarterback. Five seconds on the field and
Dana would be out of his mind and the game would be everything.
David walked through the Gaslamp, down Fourth as far as Island,
then right, and left again to Seaport Village, where he sat on a bench
with his back to the dark shops and watched the lights on the harbor and Coronado. Over and over he told himself he had to figure
out what to do about Dana. And over and over again he asked himself what was the point of pretending there was anything to figure
out. They were finished. Their marriage was over. He shifted his
thoughts to Frank Filmore’s defense. How could he do it if Peluso
said no to the plea? And then he thought of Bailey, and he loved her
and missed her and wanted to kill Micah Neuhaus. But he was already dead. His suicide denied David the only course of action that
made sense to him. He thought of Dana again.

He slept restlessly on his office couch in his shorts and T-shirt,
covered with the red, black, and white afghan his aunt had knitted
for him when he went off to Miami. He was cold, and barely slept,
and when he awoke he felt like an old man with rust in his joints.
Before anyone came into the office he made coffee, brushed his
teeth, and washed his face-but still he looked awful. Barely past
forty, he saw his father’s jowls and droopy eyes in the mirror, the result of days of stress and short sleep. He wondered what his father
had been like before power and greed had corrupted him. If David
had been able to get beyond the man’s bluster and vulgarity, might
he have learned something to help him through this time in his life?

Yesterday’s shirt was too wrinkled for court. Barbara came in at
eight-fifteen, and he sent her out to Target to buy him another one,
apologizing profusely for asking her to run a personal errand, promising to make it up to her.

A little after eight-thirty Gracie entered his office and shut the
door. She looked at the afghan and then at him.

“You slept here?”

“I don’t really want to talk about this, Gracie.”

“You didn’t go home at all?”

“Did you come in for some special reason?”

“Yeah. To say you look like shit.”

She left and came back a few minutes later with a liter bottle of
water.

“Drink this.”

“I don’t want water.” He’d already had three cups of coffee.

“You need it. Your cells are dehydrated.” She looked around the
office. “Where’s your shirt? You can’t go to court in your undershirt.”

“I sent Barbara over to Target. Nowhere else is open at this
hour.”

Gracie shook her head. “You’ll never learn.”

“I apologized to her.”

“So why didn’t you sleep at home?”

It went against his nature to talk about his marriage with a third
party, even Gracie. The sentences on his computer screen swam before his eyes. “Just let me get through this motion.”

“Allison can do it.”

“It’s not easy.”

“And she’s not stupid. Isn’t that a lucky break?” She called
Allison into the office. To David she said, “Tell her what you
need.”

He explained the motion to Allison, and she said she’d have it
done in no time and disappeared, closing the door behind her.

Gracie said, “The whole office knows something’s up. You don’t
know how wasted you look.”

He tilted his chair and stared up at the acoustic-tile ceiling.
Automatically, he counted a line of dots across one tile and then a
line down. He remembered lying on a couch in the hospital waiting
room after Bailey was born, staring at the ceiling, counting and multiplying, getting confused and starting all over again.

Gracie sat in the wing chair. “What’s up, Boss?”

“It’s such a mess, I don’t think I could explain.”

11
“Try.

He managed a wan smile, but his face stiffened and he looked
away, out the window at the two immense cranes like Star Wars contraptions already at work on a building a block away. “I don’t know
what to do about Filmore.”

“We can start with him.”

From the other side of the door he heard the office at work, keyboards, telephones ringing and voices. He told her about the re ceipt from Owens Garage, his conversations with Marsha and
Frank Filmore, and Peluso’s apparent rejection of the plea offer.

“You met on the Madeleine Hill?” She grinned. “You’re working the high wire there.”

“He thinks he can beat us.”

“Well, of course he does. He’s a prosecutor, the Almighty Hammer of the Lord.”

“I think about going into court and defending Frank and I get
physically ill. Sick.”

“What does Dana say?”

He stared at the crane until his tired eyes began to water.

“Do you believe in what we do, Gracie?”

“I couldn’t do the job if I didn’t. Of course there are times and
there are clients. Like Filmore….”

“Marsha says it’s the whining that sets him off. The way she tells
it, killing Lolly was a natural kind of mistake.”

“Like taking a wrong turn?”

“Yeah, he only meant to scare her.”

“She goes for that?”

“I don’t know what Marsha Filmore goes for.”

“And I doubt you want to.”

A knock on the door and Allison stuck her head in. “Want to
read this, Boss?”

David gestured her forward and quickly scanned the motion.

“You’re a scholar and a saint,” he said.

Allison blushed. “Anything else I can help you with?”

“Is Barbara back?”

“Sorry.” She left the office, closing the door softly. Treading on
eggshells, David thought.

“So what are you going to do?” Gracie asked, and for a second he thought she meant about Dana because even when he was thinking of Filmore, Dana was in his deeper thoughts.

“I’m stuck with him unless I could convince the judge to take me
off the case. You could handle it, you and Larry?”

“Thing is, Boss, the judge’ll never let you do it. He’s a hard-ass
about changes once a trial’s on the docket.”

“Yeah.”

“You ask me? Personally? I think you should talk to Dana about
this.”

He felt the sadness in his expression and couldn’t change it.
“Well, that’s not possible today.” Or tomorrow, either.

“David, I know how it can be when you’ve been married awhile.
Things happen. Problems that don’t go away for a while. But you
and Dana have a good marriage. You’ve been through some heavy
shit together, and you held each other up when you had to. I don’t
know what’s going on now, and you don’t have to tell me. But if
you’re smart, you’ll take my advice: go home and mend some bridges.
I’ve known you a long time; you oughta listen to me.”

She had been the most striking woman among the first-year law
students. Tall and strong, with glistening black hair cut short as a
man’s, her skin the color of almonds. To class she wore tight Levi’s,
T-shirts, and exotic earrings, and none of the professors intimidated
her. And she was smart. During orientation he’d asked to be in her
study group. As a boy he’d had many friends. In college, and when
he was a Charger, friendship had come easily to him. But there were
only two people he had trusted completely. Gracie was one of them.
The only one now.

“I guess we’re splitting up,” he said. “Shit.” His eyes teared up.
“I hate the way that sounds.”

“Jesus, Boss, I’m so sorry. I had no idea things were so rough.”

“Neither did I.”

“Now I know you got to go home. Get someone to lock the two
of you inside and don’t let you out until you’ve made up.”

“Some things … it’s not always possible to make up.”

“Boss, if you two can’t make it, what hope is there for the rest of
us?”

He could not answer that.

“What about Bailey?”

Or that, either.

A long silence followed, and eventually David began to speak
about Dana and Micah and how their affair had led to Bailey’s kidnapping.

When he finished they sat in silence for some moments.

“I suppose it would be different,” she said, “if he hadn’t taken
Bailey….”

His head snapped around. “You’d say it was okay then?”

“Not okay, but different. Not so bad.”

He stared at her.

“David, sex happens.”

“If Marshall did this-“

“Which he has.”

David felt he’d started in one game and ended up in another.

“You forgave him?”

“I live in the real world, David. And just because Marshall put
his dick in the wrong place, I’m not giving up on him. Or us.”

“But what if he-“

She held up her hand. “Don’t interrogate me. I’ll answer your
questions because you’re my friend, not my judge, or Marshall’s, either. It happened once. Marshall had an affair with a temp in his office, and I found out about six months after it was over. I was
pissed, I was hurt, I wanted to toss him out.” She leaned back in the
wing chair. “But what he did couldn’t change how I feel about him. I love him. What did change was my illusions. I don’t have them
anymore.

“It’s a matter of trust, Gracie, of being able to count on some-
one’s loyalty.”

“Those are just words, they don’t have feeling behind them.
What do you feel?”

“Mad.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. You’ve got a right to that. But what
else?”

He doodled on the yellow legal pad in front of him.

She said, “Let me tell you a story. A few years ago my mom had
this little dog that was just devoted to her. Trailed after her everywhere she went, slept on the bed. When I wasn’t around I think she
let the dog eat off her plate. It was kind of disgusting, actually.”

David was grateful not to speak.

“So one day she calls me and she’s crying because the dog has
bitten her. Made her bleed. I drove over and took her to the doctor,
got her stitches, and the doctor says she’s got to take the dog to the
vet, have it checked for rabies. Something like that. And that’s what
we did, and the dog’s up-to-date on its shots, no problem; but the
vet finds out it’s got some kind of arthritis thing in its spine and it’s
in pain. The dog’s in pain all the time, turns out, and that’s why it bit
my mom.

David rolled his eyes.

“You can be amused all you like,” Gracie said, “but what you’re
feeling now, the mad part, it’s a cover-up for something else. Maybe
hurt, or even fear.”

“I’m not afraid of anything.”

Gracie looked at him, disgusted. “Of course you’re afraid. You
don’t want your marriage to end, David. You wouldn’t know what
to do without Dana.”

He would buy a townhouse, watch television at night, and
maybe learn to cook for himself. He’d date blondes he met at
Morton’s.

It sounded like hell.

He said, “What makes you so smart?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m black, and everyone knows blacks are
smarter than whites. For another, I’m female, and we’re all of us just
way smarter than you guys. Hands down.”