Mittman, Stephanie (14 page)

"Oh,"
Charlotte said, tucking her hands up into her armpits so that she wouldn't cup
the boy's chin or something just as awful as that. "Mr. Whittier just
likes to sound gruff. Lawyers have to be very tough, you know. They've got to
keep their soft spots well hidden or someone might just discover their
Achilles' heel and—"

"So
they tend to let calluses form until that soft spot is so well protected even
they don't know it's there."

Charlotte's
hands fell to her sides at her brother-in-law's words. She took a deep breath
and then another before responding. "You make that sound like something
undesirable." He also made it sound rather unappealing. And just when she
was beginning to like the man too. Perhaps Cabot was right about his
brother—his kisses were always the Judas kind.

"To
each its place. I wouldn't like to do battle without a suit of armor, but at
the end of the day we all need a soft pillow on which to lay our heads."

"Soldiers
sleep on the hard ground," Charlotte corrected, "not in some cushy
bed surrounded by—" She caught herself before she mentioned lace, but Ash
didn't seem to notice.

"Their
loss," he said with a shrug.

"I
suppose you feel that a woman doesn't have any place on that battlefield,"
she said. All the while she could feel Davis's eyes studying her, studying her
brother-in-law, sizing them up and already declaring Ashford the victor.

"I
guess I never considered the question one way or the other."

"Consider
it," she all but demanded.
Go ahead, say I don't belong in the
courtroom.
He clearly disapproved of her dress, her manners, her
vocabulary. Why not her profession? He'd hardly be the first.

"I
think that if women were in charge," he said after an interminable
silence, "there wouldn't be as many battles. And that the battlefield
would be a more compassionate place."

She
thought there was actually a compliment buried in there somewhere, but she'd
lost the thread of the argument—something Cabot had trained her never to do.
Ashford brought her back to it.

"But
this is a house, Charlotte, not a battlefield. Home is where your soft spots
are safe. Or ought to be." He turned his back on her, claiming victory
with his finality, and addressed the boy. "I'm not all that good at
guessing ages. Twelve?"

Charlotte
wasn't at all surprised when the boy shook his head.

"Ah,
eleven, then."

The
boy didn't confirm or deny, and Ashford dropped the question, probably as sure
as she was that the boy wasn't a day over ten. She did notice, however, that
the boy came down off his toes, satisfied that Ash hadn't taken him for some
mere child.

But
then it seemed to her, hidden somewhere in their verbal duel, that Ash hadn't
taken her for some mere woman, either.

Ash
sat with Cabot in his office, hearing the quiet voices of Charlotte and Moss
next door. Spread out across the desk were pages of notes Selma had managed
from memory.

"So
the theory is that Sam's been skimming off the top all along?" Ash asked.
"I still don't see how that would tie in with the fire, even if I could
get myself to believe that he's been clever enough to steal from me for
years."

Cabot
raised an eyebrow as if to say it didn't take a genius to manage some
thimblerigging where Ash was concerned. "The idea is to cast aspersions on
your partner and feed him to the jury as a rational alternative to you. If the
man can be proven to be a thief, it isn't so big a leap to assume he could have
set a fire to cover up his crime as well," Cabot answered, drawing an
asterisk beside each of the edibles that Ash had brought to Oakland over the
last while.

"It
doesn't seem to you a rather wide chasm between pocketing a bit of profit and
torching a warehouse?" Ash pointed to an entry Cabot had missed and his
brother added a star to it.

"Whose
side are you on?" Cabot asked with a theatrical sigh as he continued
drawing lines between the buyers and the merchandise on his papers. "You
seem, if not anxious to lose your freedom, at least resigned to it."

He
supposed, in a way, he was. Actually, he'd been waiting for it for years,
expecting it, maybe even looking forward to the day he would finally be handed
the bill for his brother's injuries. In the beginning he'd expected a
first-class whooping for venturing out onto the roof outside the high room.
After all, he'd been six and only knew the kind of punishment that came from
his father's hand or, on rare occasions, his strap.

But
everyone had been so busy with Cabot and the doctors that it seemed they'd all
but forgotten him. He'd waited for the blame to come home, waited for them all
to turn on him, to take their love away, waited for them to banish him from his
home.

And
when they didn't, he banished himself, became a vagabond whose only home was a
ship with a fickle anchor. And he asked them for nothing at all, accepted nothing
from them.

Occasionally,
he would buy love wherever it happened to be for sale—something to do while he
waited.

But
there had never been any question in his mind that someday there would be a
price to pay. Maybe it was what made him so reckless.

"You
could be right," he said, watching his brother pore over each of Selma's
scribblings as if the arsonist's name were hidden in there like one of those
puzzles they sometimes stuck in the back of the newspaper. "Maybe it's
just time to pay my debts. Still, it doesn't feel quite right for me to be
rotting in jail for something I didn't do when there are so many things I have.
I mean, where's the divine retribution in that?"

Cabot
stopped fiddling with the order of his papers and stared at him
uncomprehendingly. How could Ash explain that he had expected a more
appropriate punishment in the end? That he was still looking for meaning where
there was none, and searching for forgiveness in a house where the blame still
hadn't been assessed?

"Divine
retribution isn't in our hands," Cabot said, trying to pull their focus
back to the matter before them. "Our job is to see justice done, to bend
the system to the circumstances, to wrest your freedom from twelve men heady
with their own importance. Our job is to see you found blameless in their eyes
and to hell with the Divine!"

***

Charlotte
heard Cabot raise his voice and smiled apologetically at Moss Johnson, who sat
across from her in her office. She knew how protective Moss was of his boss,
how he was Ash's right-hand man whenever his boss was in port. Yesterday Selma
had sworn her undying devotion to Ashford. Today it appeared to be Moss
Johnson's turn.

Over
the flowers that had mysteriously appeared on her desk, she studied the big man
who filled to overflowing the leather chair across from her. On his face was
the evidence of every fight, legal or otherwise, in which he'd ever had the
misfortune to take part. His left eyebrow was bisected by a scar, his right one
was half gone beneath a mound of bumpy blue-black skin.

Beneath
his brows two deep brown watery eyes blinked furiously, fighting tears.

"I
didn't wanna give no statement," Moss told her again. "They made me,
I swears it."

"Did
you say anything that wasn't true?" Charlotte asked.

He
studied the hat in his hands and shook his head so slightly that Charlotte
would have missed it if she hadn't been looking for it. "Then don't worry
about the statement, Mr. Johnson," she said softy. "It didn't do Mr.
Whittier any harm."

He
looked at her doubtfully, and she hedged.

"All
right. It didn't do him any more harm than was already done." She laced
her hands and leaned forward across the desk. "Now the question is, how
can you help him? And the answer is, by telling me everything you know about
Mr. Greenbough's business dealings in the last few months. Miss Mollenoff has
already told me about how poorly the business is doing. I understand that a
ship went down off the coast about six months ago and they took quite a
loss."

"Not
that you could tell by Mr. Greenbough," Moss said with a huff. "He
still be smokin' them two-for-a-quarter cigars like nothin' be wrong."

"Really?"
she asked, not all that surprised. Greenbough would be where she'd put her
money, if she were a betting woman. She'd been on the qui vive when it came to
him right from the beginning, but Cabot had warned her not to jump to any
conclusions. His goal was simply to exonerate Ash, not necessarily to place the
blame on someone else. She'd like to know what he'd make of this little piece
of information.

"I
can't do no testifyin' against that boy Ash, Miz Whittier. No one can do
nothin' to me that ain't already been done, and they ain't gonna make me say
another word against him, true nor false." He crossed his arms over his
chest as if that was the end of it.

The
door from Cabot's office opened and Ash stepped through it, nodding to her
politely and placing a hand on Moss's shoulder as he passed. "Thanks for
believing in me," he said, his voice gruff, his eyes on the floor as he
passed through her room toward the hall.

She
wondered which of them he was talking to and decided it was Moss. "You're
very fond of him," she said to the big man when Ash had shut the door
behind himself. Was there, she wondered, anyone as fond of her, or of Cabot, as
Moss and Selma were of Ashford Whittier? Surely she and her husband were as
well respected— more so, actually.

But
loved? She doubted either one of them engendered such loyalty, and couldn't
help wonder what it was about Ash that had even her in his corner.

Moss
hunched his shoulder and rolled it in a few big circles. "Ain't nothing
like a few good thrashings to make a man old before his time," he said as
he massaged his left shoulder vigorously.

Was
it Davis Flannigan's left arm or his right that was in a sling? She couldn't
remember. Why hadn't Dr. Mollenoff given her any instructions about tending to
the boy? She could see for herself he was better, but for how long? And would
Cabot allow him to stay? Maybe Ash could convince him if she could not. Ash
could probably convince a squirrel to lay eggs if that was what he set his mind
to.

"That's
all for now," she said abruptly, coming to her feet so quickly that her
cup of tea went spattering to the floor, sending a hundred tiny shards in every
direction. Her hands shook as she crouched down to pick up each tiny piece of
the last of her mother's old china cups.

She
needed to talk to Cabot, needed him now, to tell her that Davis wouldn't spend
his life as someone's punching bag. Tell her, too, that someone cared for her
as much as Moss did for his boss. And most of all she wanted his assurance that
the world of law she so desperately wanted to be part of wasn't as inhuman as
Ashford kept trying to imply.

Instead
she waved away Moss's clumsy attempts to help her, and gathered into the trash
the remnants of her precious cup while Moss moved the saucer into the center of
her desk and out of harm's way.

"Mr.
Flannigan's here, señora." Maria's voice followed a soft knock and then
was drowned out by several sets of footsteps.

"It's
my son I'm coming for," the man said. Charlotte came to her feet quickly,
taking his measure as she did. He was cleaner, better dressed, and more
presentable than she'd expected. He was also a good deal handsomer. He didn't
reek of alcohol, his nose wasn't red and bulbous. He held his hat in one hand
and rubbed the fingers of the other nervously against the buttons of his coat.
"And I'm trusting the lad weren't no trouble."

"Davis
is hardly the
problem here," she said, extending her hand just the
way Cabot would. "I'm Charlotte Whittier. You are Mr. Flannigan, I
presume?"

"Ewing
Flannigan," he said with a slight nod of his head. Behind him she could
see Ashford, his hand on Davis's shoulder.

In
the other room Charlotte heard Cabot cough. It was his signal for her to come
into his office for instructions. She ignored him and introduced Moss to Mr.
Flannigan.

"Mr.
Johnson was a fighter of some renown," she said, though she had no doubt
that Ewing Flannigan knew him by reputation and that if he had any doubt
whether this was
the
Moss Johnson it was removed when Moss came to his
feet and towered over him.

Flannigan
nodded. And swallowed.

"I
hope you don't mind," she said as sweetly as she could feign under the
circumstances, "but I've invited Davis to visit us again next weekend."

Cabot
coughed more loudly, pointedly. Flannigan's eyes darted to the inner office
door, but Davis's, Ash-ford's, and Moss's all stayed glued to her.

"Dr.
Mollenoff will bring him here on Friday and you may come to pick him up Sunday
evening, provided you are in a condition to do so."

"You've
got no right," Flannigan mumbled, apparently too afraid to speak up in the
presence of Moss.

Charlotte
motioned to Davis, who came and stood next to her. He came up only an inch or
two higher than Moss's silver belt buckle. "You talk to me of rights, Mr.
Flannigan? What of his rights? The right to be loved, cared for, safe? I can't
do anything about the first two, but I can secure his safety in a court of law,
if I have to—"