So Like Sleep (27 page)

“Right.”

“And try to settle out of court first.”

“Yeah. Well, kinda. See, if we can negotiate a fair settlement out of court, then we can put all the kinds of things I’d want the judge to order in our written agreement, and then we just pass it by the court at the final hearing.”

“So everything looks like a consensus, not a command?”

Chris beamed. “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Okay, let me get this straight. You’re afraid of Marsh, but you don’t want to tick him off by going to court first. So you want me to do exactly what?”

“Come with me, with Hanna and me, to the settlement conference over to Roy’s lawyer.”

“And do what?”

“Nothing. Just sit there.”

“Chris, you want a bodyguard.”

He winced. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“I would. Why don’t you hire an off-duty cop?”

“Because the coupla guys I know on the Peabody force would be out of their jurisdiction in Marblehead. And I don’t know anybody on their force.”

“Then why not have the settlement conference here?”

Chris slouched back in his chair, placing his palms behind his head and grinning. “Because, as a negotiating tactic, I let her persuade me to have it in Marblehead.”

“Hanna?”

“No, no. Felicia Arnold. She’s Roy’s attorney. Heard of her?”

“No.”

Chris closed his eyes and spoke blissfully. “She’s big-time, John. Used to do a lot of criminal defense work, then got religion and does world-class divorce stuff. It proves that this guy Marsh is the real thing, financially speaking.”

I thought about Chris and how much this case probably meant to him and Eleni, “financially speaking.” I thought about how I had lost Beth, a day at a time over months, while Chris was losing Eleni, a day at a time over years. I had agreed to do dumber things for worse reasons.

“Okay, I’m in.”

Chris came forward, wringing his hands like a big winner about to rake in a poker pot. “Great, great.”

“Are we meeting Hanna there?”

“Naw, her car’s on the fritz, so I picked her up this morning. She and the kid are with Eleni. In the kitchen. C’mon.”

As Chris grabbed his coat off the hook behind the door, I said, “By the way, what does this marauder do for a living?”

Chris balked. “Marsh?”

“Yeah, Marsh.”

Chris turned away and began walking. “He sells insurance.”

She looked worse than I could have imagined.

Hanna Marsh stood up when Chris and I entered the kitchen. She rose a good inch taller than Chris, even in flat shoes. A sturdy figure that childbearing had made a little fleshy. She wore her platinum hair short enough to show dark roots if there had been any. A blond girl clutched the woman’s right leg at the knee with both arms, causing Hanna’s simple blue wool dress to bunch up. The child first buried her face in Hanna’s thigh, then looked up at me bright-eyed and said, “My name’s Vickie, and this is my mother.”

I tried to manage a convincing smile at both of them, but Eleni’s appearance had shocked me. A doctor friend once told me that multiple sclerosis waxes and wanes. For Eleni, it looked like straight-line deterioration.

I recalled her first with a cane, then metallic polio braces. Now the MS had shoved her into a wheelchair. The hands and arms looked normal, but whatever was left of her legs was hidden in folds of a long black skirt, and there was an intermittent twitch in one of the muscles in her left cheek, creating the bizarre impression of a woman caricaturing a flirtatious come-on. The hair had grayed unevenly and seemed dried and pulled. Had you seen her from the neck up, and without the twitch, you might have called her a striking woman of sixty. If I had my dates right, she’d just turned thirty.

I looked for traces of the laughing, dancing woman of eighteen that Chris had introduced as his “arranged” fiancée. A black-haired, green-eyed immigrant whose independence wasn’t much tempered by an almost complete inability to speak English. She’d come to America to avoid the restrictions of the old ways on what women could do and what men could do to them, but the disease had bowed her in a way that millennia of tradition hadn’t.

“John,” said Eleni.

I leaned over and took her hand, kissing her lightly on the cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear.

Chris said, “Although it’s pretty obvious, I guess, John Cuddy, Hanna Marsh.”

“And me,” said Vickie.

“And you,” I said, looking down at Vickie as I shook Hanna’s hand. It was dry, but trembling.

“Mr. Cuddy,” said Hanna, her voice husky and catching, “I am sorry, but I want to thank you for coming with us today.”

“Mrs. Marsh …”

“Hey,” said Chris, “What’s with this Mr. and Mrs., huh? It’s John and Hanna, right?”

“And Vickie,” I said, beating the child to it by just a bit, which seemed to please her.

“Where are we going, anyway?” said Vickie.

“Not you,” said Eleni, gracefully, “You and me stay here and make the files. Remember?”

“Oh, right,” said Vickie. She looked up and beckoned me to squat down to her level. “John, when you and Mommie get back, I want you to meet Cottontail.”

“Cottontail?”

“Yes, she’s my little kitty and she’d like to play with you.”

“She would, huh?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, we’ll see if we have time afterwards. Okay?”

Vickie was crestfallen. “That’s what my daddy always says. ‘We’ll see.’ ”

Chris said, “Hey, let’s get rolling here.” He moved to Eleni and bent down as if to kiss her, but I don’t think they made actual physical contact. “We’ll probably be there awhile, so be sure to give her lunch, huh?”

“Don’t worry about us. Me and Vickie gonna be office people together. Right, Vickie?”

“Right.”

Making the files and office people together. As Chris, Hanna, and I walked out to his car, I wondered whether the temp-being-late line was the only white lie he’d fed me.

W
E DROVE EAST ON
Route 114, through the city of Salem, where witches were tried and burned, and past the state college. I rode in the backseat, listening to Chris and Hanna in the front. He was shooting disconnected questions rapidly; she was answering them as best she could. Based on what I knew about lawyer-client relations, most of the financial, custody, and even more personal topics Chris asked about should have been covered much earlier and without a third party like me present.

Chris had scrawled some directions to Felicia Arnold’s office on a yellow legal pad, but once in downtown Marblehead itself, we got lost anyway. As Chris inched through the traffic patterns, the scenes out the windows supported my memories of Marblehead. One-way streets and narrow alleys, flanked by huge clapboard houses on postage-stamp lots.

Once the home port of ship captains, the town was now headquarters for at least three distinct populations. One was the old-towners, enjoying substantial ancestral money and spectacular homes across the sheltered harbor on a spit of land called Marblehead Neck. The second group consisted of established, blue-collar families involved in commercial fishing or boat servicing. New-towners comprised the third population, mostly professionals who worked in Boston but had tired of city life and come to Marblehead to enjoy the sights and smells of a suburb on the sea. Word had it that some folks had done very well in the import business, specializing in a certain brown-green, vegetablelike substitute for tobacco.

Chris finally found Arnold’s address, a beautifully restored two-story mansion on a high hill overlooking the harbor. Outside the car, the sea breeze lifted the high, metallic singsong of the masts and stays of thousands of pleasure sailers moored below us. At an average length of twenty-four feet and an average cost of $15,000, there was probably more seaworthiness there than we lost at Pearl Harbor.

A receptionist greeted us inside the heavy brass-knockered front door and led us upstairs. I was last in line, and as I reached the top of the steps, I saw off in a desk area to my right a svelte woman, fortyish with auburn hair clipped in a not-quite-punk style. She arched an eyebrow and smiled at me. A younger, lawyer-like man with tinted eyeglasses and a beard appeared beside her. She said something to him out of the side of her mouth while she watched me. I had the distinct feeling of being inspected and assessed as her smile became a smirk. The young man glared at me and turned away from her.

“Sir?” said the receptionist at my left.

“Yes?”

“The conference room is this way.”

“Yes, thank you.”

She showed me into a lushly carpeted arena with a glass-walled vista of sails so bright I had to squint. Chris and Hanna were already seated. Chris had both hands in his battered briefcase, coaxing a slim file past a bulging one. Hanna fidgeted next to him.

The receptionist said, “Ms. Arnold will be with you shortly” and closed the door.

Chris slapped a form in front of Hanna that had a slew of dollar figures in pencil, some of them with question marks and others crossed out and rewritten. “This is your financial statement.”

Hanna’s mind took a moment to click in. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Your financial statement. Weekly expenses and stuff you need like we talked about on the phone. It’s just a draft, but we’ll be using it today and you gotta make sure it’s accurate.”

Chris turned back to his file, madly flipping through it for something. Any fool could see that Hanna, who spent all of five seconds on the financial statement, was in no shape to verify anything, especially without her checkbook and bills for comparison. I also couldn’t believe that Chris intended to show an opponent the uncertainties the hand-scratched form suggested about Hanna’s, and Vickie’s, needs.

There was a polite tap at the door, and my inspector/assessor came in. Up close, she seemed nearer to fifty and as carefully restored as her offices, with taut facial features, a glowing tan, and flattering highlights in the auburn hair that I somehow didn’t think came from the sun. She smiled at all of us, lingering on me before saying, “Hello, Chris. And you must be Hanna. I’m Felicia Arnold.”

Arnold extended her hand, with long, lacquered nails, to Hanna, who shook, both figuratively and literally. Arnold turned to me and said, “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure?”

I stood and said, “John Cuddy. I’m—”

“He’s my new associate,” Chris blurted.

I tried to keep the anger off my face as Arnold took my hand, then drew a nail along my palm as she released it, saying, “I’ll have to follow your recruitment technique more closely, Chris. I hadn’t realized you were expanding.”

He said, “It was kinda sudden.”

Before I could think of an acceptable way to tell the truth, Arnold swung her head around to bring everyone into the conversation. “I’m afraid I’ve just had a call from Mr. Marsh. He’s been delayed and won’t be here for approximately forty-five minutes.”

Chris said, “Jeez, Felicia, I told you when we set this up that I’d be pressed if we ran late. I got this closing up in Lowell …”

Arnold acted heartbroken. “Yes, Chris, I know. And I reminded Mr. Marsh of that and he promised to be just as quick as he could be. But I really am reluctant to start anything substantive without his being present. So …” She opened the door and backed through it. “… I’m going to try to get some other work done. Please feel free to use the library. Just buzz five on the intraoffice phone if you’d like coffee.”

After the door closed, Hanna said, very quietly, “I told you this would happen.”

“Now, Hanna, I’m sure …”

I said, “What do you mean?”

Hanna looked up at me, her gray eyes hard and sad at the same time. “This is Roy’s way. To hold everybody up so he can be the center, the control of everything.”

“Well, at least this way you and Chris have more time to prepare. I’ll be in the library so you two can talk confidentially.”

I was scanning the library shelves for anything remotely interesting to read when I heard Arnold’s voice behind me. “John, could I have a word with you? In my office?”

By the time I had turned around, she was already walking away from me with that long, vibrating strut of a leggy woman in high heels. I felt like a fourth-grader being summoned by the principal.

Arnold’s office was a little larger than the conference room and even more tastefully appointed in Orientals and leathers. On the corner of the building, one large window captured the harbor while the other offered a more specific view of a couple of magnificent homes across the water on Marblehead Neck.

“Please, sit down.”

I sat and watched her ease into the large swivel desk chair. She had a dancer’s body and a ballerina’s absolute control of it. I decided to wait her out.

“Well?” she finally said.

I just watched her.

She dissolved to disgust. Picking up the telephone, she pushed one button and said, “Paul? Now, please.”

She hung up and seconds later a door on a side wall opened. The bearded man I’d seen earlier came through it, pad in hand.

Arnold said, “Mr. Cuddy, this is my associate, Paul Troller. Paul?”

Troller spoke without reading from his pad. “The Board of Bar Overseers lists no ‘John Cuddy’ or variation thereof licensed to practice in the Commonwealth. The Board of Bar Examiners shows no such name or variation sitting for any of the last three bar exams.” He regarded me in a superior way. “I haven’t had time to research the penalty for impersonating an attorney.”

I said to Arnold, “His batteries expensive?”

She toyed with a grin as he clenched his free fist and bent the pad lengthwise in the other. “I wouldn’t upset Paul if I were you. He was a finalist in the Golden Gloves before enrolling in law school.”

I reached for my identification as Paul took a step toward me. “I’m a private investigator. There was some concern about Mr. Marsh’s good behavior here today. If Chris had seen a copy of Paulie’s resume, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been necessary.”

Troller’s next step was cut short by her saying “Paul,” stretching out the syllable with an authoritative lilt at the end. She leaned forward and took my identification, seeming somehow relieved as she read it.