Heat Wave (7 page)

These things were all important. This was a
high-profile case, and ordinarily Caleb would be surging with
adrenaline. He loved big cases, tough cases, challenging cases.

But he was distracted right now. As Niall
described the petty politics of his home town and listed previous
outbreaks of corruption in Town Hall, Caleb struggled not to gaze
across the room at the jukebox on display against the far wall.
Would it play “Heat Wave” again? Or some other equally evocative
song? Not that “Heat Wave was particularly evocative…but the song
was still thumping inside his skull, tearing him apart.

No, the song wasn’t tearing him apart, even
if the women who sang the song claimed they were being torn apart.
That was them. This was Caleb. He was fine. Not torn at all.

He sipped his iced tea.
Heather was drinking merlot, Niall a beer, but Caleb wanted to be
clear-headed when he met with Meredith. He wasn’t concerned about
needing to be fully sober around her. It was more that he wanted to
be fully sober around himself. Because—damn it, he
was
being torn apart, and
he didn’t know why.

The heat. The freaking broken air
conditioning. The possibility that he’d have to drag the firm’s
landlord into court to get the damned thing properly repaired. The
possibility that he’d die of heat stroke before he had the
opportunity to do that.

The knowledge that in—he checked his
watch—eight minutes, he’d be saying goodbye to his partners and
cruising down Atlantic Avenue to the Lobster Shack. In about twelve
minutes, he’d be entering the restaurant. In less than a half hour,
he’d be eating dinner with Meredith.

He wondered how she’d look in one of those
Lobster Shack bibs. He wondered if she picked the lobster meat out
of the shell delicately with a miniature shellfish fork, or if she
tore the claws with her bare hands and sucked the meat directly
from the shell. He wondered how she looked when her lips were
glistening with melted butter.

“So, we’re agreed on Blanche Larson for the
forensics,” Niall said. “We’ve got to have her go through Felton’s
accounts. Caleb, you can arrange that, right?”

Caleb jerked his brain back to the business
being discussed at the table. “Yeah. We need a look at Sheila
Valenti’s finances, too. See if she’s stashed a sudden, unexplained
windfall in the Caymans.”

“Eight hundred thousand is too little to
bother with an off-shore shelter,” Heather argued.

“To a small-town treasurer,” Caleb pointed
out, “eight hundred thousand is a fortune. Who knows what she’d do
with it?”

“Let’s find out what she’s driving and when
she bought it,” Niall said. “We’ll check out her house. Any major
purchases.”

“If she has a husband, he could be earning
big bucks,” Heather reminded him. “He could be paying for the big
purchases.”

“We’ll dig. We’ll demand everything. God, I
love discovery.” Niall grinned.

Caleb nodded. The discovery process could be
tedious—lawyers asked the opposing side for all the documents they
could think of, and once they had those documents in their
possession, they examined every single scrap of paper, every email,
every ambiguous ink smudge. But when they unearthed the proverbial
needle in the haystack—the incriminating memo, the unexplained
money transfer, the charge card receipt from a hotel in the Cayman
Islands—the tedium was worth it.

He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got to
go,” he said. “We’ll brainstorm more tomorrow.”

“Hot date?” Niall asked, his grin
widening.

“No. Dinner with an almost-client. And the
Lobster Shack is air-conditioned, so it won’t be hot, thank
God.”

The evening pressing its summer weight upon
Brogan’s Point was definitely not air conditioned. Just walking
down the street to his car dampened Caleb’s brow with a layer of
perspiration. If his dinner with Meredith had been a hot date, he
would have made a quick detour home to shower and change into fresh
clothes. But it wasn’t a date, he reminded himself, then wondered
why he needed the reminder.

His Audi had a fine climate control system,
but he opted to turn it off and open the windows instead. Cruising
down Atlantic Avenue, he wanted to smell the ocean. The wind was
humid and fragrant, lifting off the water, sweeping across the
beach and flinging itself into his car, where it tangled through
his hair and evaporated the dampness from his skin. Some people
didn’t like the scent of the ocean. He loved it. Growing up on Long
Island, he’d head to the beach every chance he got, even if he had
to cut school to do it. He’d worked summers in an arcade on the
boardwalk in Long Beach, just to be near the water. When Niall had
contacted him at the Boston law firm where he’d been doing document
reviews and scrambling to accumulate billable hours, and invited
him to move up to Brogan’s Point to join the practice he was
creating with their law school classmate, Heather, Caleb had been
tempted by the opportunity to quit doing scut work for senior
partners, to be his own boss, and to create a firm with his
friends. But the fact that Brogan’s Point was a seaport had
clinched the deal.

He found a parking space near the dock where
the Lobster Shack was located, put up his windows, and locked the
car. This absolutely couldn’t be a date, he told himself, because
if it were, he’d have mopped his face and combed his hair before
entering the humble warehouse-like building that served the
freshest seafood on the North Shore, straight off the trawlers that
docked within sight of the restaurant’s kitchen.

He stepped inside—and there she was,
standing by the hostess station, her gaze fixed on the door. A
glimpse of the clock on the wall behind the hostess assured him he
was right on time. Meredith Benoit had arrived early.

If he’d been more clear-headed, he would
have noted that he was overdressed. She’d changed into skinny jeans
that displayed those long legs of hers, a soft white shirt which
tied in a decorative knot above her left hip, and flat leather
sandals that displayed her dainty polished toenails. He felt
something start burning inside.

Stupid song. Stupid lyrics. Nothing was
burning inside. The restaurant was refreshingly cool. So was
Meredith’s smile as he approached the hostess. “Here we are,”
Meredith said, half to him and half to the hostess.

A minute later, they were seated facing each
other at a table midway between the entrance and the rest rooms.
The restaurant’s interior was as unpretentious as its exterior:
butcher paper on the tables, rough paneled walls, paper napkins and
plastic laminated menus. “Did you have to wait long?” he asked once
they were seated. “I’m sorry. I came straight from a meeting.” He
gestured at his apparel, then shed his jacket and yanked his tie
free from his collar. He opened the top button of his shirt, rolled
up his sleeves, and belatedly shoved his hair back from his
face.

“You’re a busy man,” she said gently.
“Representing Brogan’s Point’s boss.”

“Town manager,” he corrected her. “I don’t
think he’s got enough juice to qualify as a boss.”

Her frown was as dainty as her pedicure.
Given her determination to fight a trivial citation, her apparent
devotion to her career—or at least to getting tenure—and her
insistence on taking him out for dinner, he knew she was no
shrinking violet. Yet she exuded femininity in a way he rarely
encountered. Most of the women he socialized with were tough broads
and proud of it. He suspected that Meredith was just as tough. But
she was tough in an unnervingly polite, feminine way.

“Juice?” she asked.

“Power. Clout.”

She nodded. “Do you think Mr. Felton is
innocent?”

He laughed. She definitely wasn’t a
shrinking violet. “I’m his attorney. My job is to defend him. More
than that I’m not going to say.” He glanced at the menu, pondering
whether to order a boiled lobster, messy though that would be. He
noticed a cold seafood platter and decided to go for that, instead.
Let the chef pull the lobster out of the shell for him. Besides,
with all that fire burning inside, he’d just as soon eat something
cold.

The waitress arrived with a plastic basket
of rolls and a dish filled with foil-wrapped pats of butter.
Meredith ordered the cold seafood platter, too, and a glass of
Pinot Grigio. Caleb opted for a beer.

Meredith said nothing until their drinks
arrived. She had a stillness about her, something Caleb admired
because stillness was so lacking in himself. Even when he was
relaxing, his brain churned constantly. There was always some
puzzle to solve, some fact to deconstruct, some argument demanding
refutation. His thoughts unspooled in strings of words. He couldn’t
just think. He thought in sentences, in italics, in arguments.

Meredith’s brain might be churning, too—but
if it was, she gave nothing away. She sat serenely, her pretty blue
eyes drifting to a trite painting of a sailboat hanging on the wall
above their table, to the fishing net draped from the ceiling above
the hostess station, to Caleb, to the clock—shaped, of course, like
a boat’s steering wheel—and back to Caleb again. She seemed so
enviably calm. He wondered if she could maintain her calmness when
standing before a classroom of rowdy teenage students. If she
could, her school ought to tenure her in immediately. Any high
school teacher who could remain so apparently unflappable was a
treasure.

She lifted her glass to him and said, “A
toast to you, for getting my ticket tossed. I hope there’s nothing
underhanded about what you did.”

“Totally legal.” He held up his hands, as if
to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide. “I just pointed out to
Officer Sulkowski that penalizing you for something that wasn’t
your fault didn’t seem fair. I tossed in a few lawyer words for
good measure. That’s it.”

“I wish you’d send me a bill,” she said.
“Taking you out to dinner… I feel as if I owe you more than
this.”

“No, it’s fine. Really.” He absorbed her
message: she would preferred to have settle her debt to him in a
more businesslike fashion, rather than in this informal, friendly
way. This wasn’t a date. Caleb got it. “Billing you would have
complicated things,” he explained. “I’d have to run your case past
my partners. They’d have told me it was too minor and I shouldn’t
waste time on it.” He took another sip of beer. “Besides, I like
this place. Great food, no atmosphere. My kind of joint.” He helped
himself to a roll. “So, where are you from? That’s not a Boston
accent.”

She smiled. “Savannah.”

“Georgia? You’re a long way from home.”

“This is home for me now” She smiled. “I
like it here. I guess I’m the true rebel in my family, living among
the aggressors in the War Between the States.” She fell silent as
the waitress appeared with their meals—heaping platters filled with
shrimp, a slab of cold poached salmon, a mound of what appeared to
be crab salad, and a full lobster tail, open and inviting, all
sitting on a layer of romaine lettuce.

Meredith thanked the waitress. She might be
living among the victors of the Civil War, but she still displayed
Southern manners.

As soon as they were alone,
Caleb said, “I can’t believe people down in Georgia would consider
you a rebel.” When he thought of rebels, he thought of people who
weren’t so…
nice
.

She focused on lifting the lobster meat out
of its shell, slowly and neatly. Then she smiled at him. “Here I am
in New England. That’s rebellious for a family with deep roots in
Savannah. My brother went to Vanderbilt. My sister went to Emory.
When it was my turn to go to college, I chose Oberlin, of all
places. Way up north in Ohio. And I liked it! I liked the winter,
and the people, and the politics. Downright scandalous, right?”

“It sounds very sane to me.” He dug into the
salmon. “So, your family wanted you to be a debutante or
something?”

“No. They wanted me to be a lawyer.”

“Really?”

“My father is a lawyer. My brother is a
lawyer. My sister married a lawyer. I think that would have been my
parents’ second choice—if I wasn’t going to become a lawyer myself,
I could marry one. I did take the LSAT’s, thinking I would apply to
law school. But I decided I wanted to take a little time off. I
think I was stalling, because deep in my heart, I didn’t want to be
a lawyer. So I applied to Teach for America, and they accepted me
and sent me to a school up in Lawrence. I loved it so much, I went
back to college for a Master of Arts in Teaching. And here I
am.”

“Hopefully getting tenure next year.”

“Thanks to you,” she said.

He couldn’t take credit for that. He had the
feeling she’d get tenure regardless, given her dedication. You
didn’t defy your family’s expectations for something that didn’t
mean a lot to you. “You’ll get tenure,” he predicted. “Your little
problem on the beach won’t factor into it at all.”

Her cheeks darkened with a blush. She even
blushed delicately, a shade about three degrees lighter than the
salmon on her plate.

“I didn’t mean to embarrass you,” he
apologized.

“I’m not. I mean…” She sighed and lowered
her fork. “I need to ask you something, and it’s going to sound
ridiculous.”

“I’m a lawyer. I’m used to ridiculous
questions.”

She allowed herself a slight smile, then
grew serious. “That song yesterday, in the tavern? Was there
something…I don’t know, odd about it?”

“‘
Heat Wave’?” he guessed,
even though he knew the answer. Of course she was talking about
“Heat Wave.” Maybe she was being torn apart, too.

“It’s an old rock and roll song, right? From
our parents’ era?”

“I think so. It’s definitely old. That
jukebox is old.”

“But it just…I don’t know. It got stuck in
my head. What my students call an ear-worm.”