Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (21 page)

“Max, he’s your age.”

“Even better … he’ll want to screw you.” He
laughed again, his mood softening, maybe pleased she was confiding
her fears. She so seldom showed any insecurity.

“Stop worrying,” he said. “You’re going to
get the job. You’re going to be the sexiest smartest law clerk in
the history of the Supreme Court.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“You’re being interviewed by a man, and deep
inside, we’re all alike.”

No, Max, you’re not. You and Tony were not
alike. And I doubt you and Sam Truitt share much in common despite
the same configuration of x and y chromosomes.

She’d never told Max that she’d become Tony
Kingston’s lover after their break-up her first year in law school.
As far as Max knew, Tony was just the navy pilot she’d introduced
him to, the hometown hero she said would be a great addition to the
Atlantica fleet. Well, she was right, wasn’t she?

“It’s different on the Supreme Court,” Lisa
said. “You know what they taught us first year in law school?”

“Probably how to overcharge your
clients.”

“
Jus est ars boni et aequi.
 Law
is the art of the good and the just.”

“And the meek shall inherit the earth,” Max
responded in the sarcastic tone she knew so well. He walked to the
window and wrapped his arms around her from behind. “If the law
worked so damn well, O.J. would have sucked gas, Klaus von Bulow
would have been stuck full of needles, and”—he paused a moment, as
if not sure whether to continue—“and your father would have been
hung by his testicles.”

She turned around in his arms to face him.
“And the victims of Flight six-forty would have hit Atlantica for
several hundred million in verdicts,” she added.

“Sort of proves my point, doesn’t it?”

It did, but his cynicism irritated her. If
Max were right, then why had she just spent three years studying
law and another year clerking for a federal judge? Just to be
another manipulator of the system? But even if he were wrong, how
could she turn him down? Max had never denied her anything. He had
supported her, nurtured her, helped her grow into an adult. In
return, she had been his lover for most of the past decade. He’d
been understanding when she left him during law school and
comforting when she’d come back after Tony’s death. And now, for
the first time, he wanted something more, something that collided
head-on with everything she had learned the past four years.

“If justice is such a rare commodity,” she
said, “maybe I should work for it. Maybe I should help put
criminals in jail or defend the wrongfully accused.”

“You’re too smart for that. That’s sucker
talk. I don’t see you in the Justice Department or in some public
defender’s office with a metal desk and stale coffee.”

“I remember the first time you told me how
smart I was,” she said. “It was endearing then. Now, it sounds like
an insult.”

“There’s smart,” he said, “like book
learning, which can open some doors but otherwise doesn’t mean
shit, and then there’s streetsmart, which you can’t buy with a
degree. You got both, which knocks my socks off.”

No one had ever expressed admiration for her
intelligence before Max came along. Not her teachers, not her
mother, not her father. Especially not her father, whose praise was
limited to her physical assets.

Max had told her she could be anything she
wanted, and she believed him. He gave her confidence and a chance
at a new life. Now that she had that life, she didn’t want to risk
losing it.

“Do you remember when you told me I was
smarter than you?” she asked.

“Sure. It was the night we met.”

* * *

Max Wanaker walked into the Tiki Club and sat
down on a bar stool in front of the stage. It had a rusty brass
go-go pole, chains hanging from the ceiling, a scratchy sound
system, and a number of missing bulbs in the multicolored lighting
system. In the back was a darkened lap-dancing lounge with black
satin couches. The place smelled like a mixture of stale beer and
cheap perfume, moist mildew and industrial strength cleaner.

A connoisseur of strip joints, Max preferred
the sophisticated atmosphere of Ten’s in Manhattan, where
fifty-five exotic dancers stroll onto the stage in full-length
sequined gowns, strobe lights blasting, smoke machine billowing.
Tonight, he was slumming. Mainly because he had been bored, he told
the limo driver to stop when he saw the flashing neon
sign, LIVE GIRLS.

As opposed to what? DEAD GIRLS?

The sign, as effective as the Sirens’ songs
that lured sailors onto the rocks, brought Max into the club. Now
he approached the small stage, scanning the room. The strippers all
looked as if they’d been ridden hard—the meaty redhead slouching on
stage, out of step with Aerosmith, already down to her ratty gold
panties, oversize tits barely bouncing, the two in lingerie at the
bar, cadging drinks—all of them with big hair, six-inch nails, and
siliconed melon breasts. He had one watery Scotch and was ready to
leave when Lisa came on the stage to the music of Billy Joel.

Jesus, she’s just a kid.

She looked like a cheerleader. Small breasts,
sleek reddish blonde hair, clear blue eyes, long legs, a full
mouth, little makeup other than painted-on whiskers, something he
didn’t get until he realized she was wearing a tight leopard skin
dress with little leopard ears. She seemed embarrassed, and he was
enchanted.

She could dance. She moved smoothly to the
music, closing her eyes, which he knew was a no-no. It occurred to
Max that he knew more about her business than she did.

You’re supposed to make eye contact, baby.
You’re supposed to make every guy in the joint feel like you’ve got
the hots just for him.

She was so young and so obviously new at this
that Max felt a stirring. Not just to bag her. Hell, he’d bedded
down half his company’s secretaries, more than a few strippers,
plus his daughter’s fourth-grade teacher. This one was different.
She looked like she didn’t belong here.

What’s a nice girl like you …

The old male rescue fantasy took hold even
before he talked to her. What he could do for her!

And vice versa.

The leopard dress was off now, and she was
holding on to the brass pole, each leg astride it, grinding her
hips in time with the music, humping that lucky pole, her firm ass
moving rhythmically in time with his pulse. Her eyes wide open now,
she looked at Max and seemed to blush.

Now there’s a first.

Then she smiled shyly at him, swung away from
the pole, and drifted up to the edge of the stage. He slipped a
twenty-dollar bill into her garter where it joined a number of
singles. The garter was all she wore, other than the high-heeled
shoes. Her strawberry nipples were erect, her mouth set in an
innocent, yet seductive smile. She never said a word. She just
turned around and bent over, putting her hands on her knees and
arching her back. She wiggled her ass clockwise, as if on coasters,
stopped and wiggled counterclockwise. With impressive muscle
control, her buttocks quivered in time with the music, and he felt
the contractions in his own loins.

Later, when her set was done, back in her
slinky leopard dress and little leopard ears, Lisa wobbled up to
him on six-inch heels and inquired with her whiskered smile and cat
eyes if he’d like to buy her a drink.

“What’s your name?” he had asked, “Jellylorum
or Mistoffelees,” for he had just taken his wife to see the
musical 
Cats
 in London.

“Rumpleteazer,” she said without missing a
beat.

“You’ve seen the show,” he said,
surprised.

“No way! My boyfriend thinks live theater is
watching three lesbians in leather and chains.”

“Then how—”

“When I was a kid, I read the Eliot
poems. 
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
”

“When you were a kid,” he repeated,
smiling.

“Yeah. I thought the poems were silly. I
think Eliot should have stuck to ‘The Waste Land.’“

“Really? You read a lot?”

“I’m taking classes. That’s all I do. Study
by day, strip by night.”

He watched her size him up, noting the
manicured, polished nails, the gold cuff links, the dark suit. She
wasn’t even subtle about it just taking inventory, probably
calculating her tip by the pedigree of his watch. Cocking her head
the way the older girls must have shown her, she said, “So you want
a private dance or what?”

He laughed. “You really are a rumpleteazer,
aren’t you?

“I’m not J. Alfred Prufrock.”

“What’s your name? You never told me.”

“Angel,” she lied.

“Nah. I’m your 
angel
.”

And he was. Max Wanaker, who at that time
owned a Miami freight forwarding company and had just beaten back a
Teamsters strike, rescued Lisa Fremont teenage runaway. He spirited
her out of the Tenderloin and put her in an apartment on Nob Hill.
It was there—where little cable cars climb halfway to the
stars—that Max made an amazing discovery. Lisa wasn’t like the
others, which is to say, she wasn’t after money. This brainy
stripper read Dostoevsky in the dressing room between sets, picked
up her high school degree in night school, and was about to enroll
in community college when Max bulldozed his way into her life and
suggested Berkeley instead.

“You’re smarter than I am,” he told her that
first night. And then repeated it time and again until she believed
it was true.

Lisa poured Max another stiff shot of
Glenmorangie, the pricey single-malt Scotch he ordered by the case.
He twirled the golden liquid in the glass, sniffed it took a sip.
The ritual done, he turned to her. “So what’s the bottom line? Are
we on the same page here?”

Speaking in corporate jargon when it’s my
life!

“I can’t do it, Max. I can’t prostitute
myself.”

Max’s face reddened. He stared at her in
disbelief. “What!”

“I would do anything for you, but not
this.”

“
This
 is the only thing I’ve ever
asked.”

“I’m sorry. I want to help, but …”

Max had been wonderful. If it weren’t for
him, where would she be now? But what he had given her—the
education, the belief in herself—had changed her. She didn’t know
precisely when she had rejected Max’s way of life, but somewhere
between the Tiki Club and the Supreme Court, she had moved on.
“You’re asking too much, Max.”

“After all I’ve done for you,” Max said, his
voice a razor despite the mellow whiskey, “don’t you think you owe
me this?”

He’d never said that before, not even close.
Anger boiled up inside her. Her look was lethal, her voice icy.
“Why not just total up my bill, and I’ll pay you back with
interest. What’s the prime rate these days, Max?”

“It’s not the money and you know it. I just
resent this attitude of yours, like you’re looking down at me.”

Lisa padded barefoot to the bar and dumped
her drink into the sink. “From the curb to the gutter, Max. It’s
not that far.”

Max looked wounded, like it was his blood
going down the drain. “You stopped smoking. You’re not drinking. Is
there anything else you’re not going to do, anything I ought to
know about?”

She didn’t answer, just stood there,
stone-faced.

“The new, improved Lisa Fremont,” he said,
sarcastically.

“Don’t you like me this way?”

* * *

No, Max Wanaker thought. He didn’t like her
this way at all. Christ who had she become? Maybe it served him
right. He had wanted Lisa to grow, had encouraged her independence,
but look what happened. The roses still bloomed, but they’d grown
thorns. He liked Lisa the 
girl
, not Lisa Fremont, Esq.,
the 
woman
, the goddam lawyer. She’s been a tough kid.
Hell, she had to be to survive. Now she gets misty eyed looking at
statues and books. How long until she learns that her precious
oaths and credos are just fade J ink on rotting paper?

Max struggled to control his anger and mask
his desperation. He wanted to tell her just how important the case
was to him. He wanted to tell her that it wasn’t just about money
or even the survival of the company. He wanted to tell her the
truth.

If we don’t win, I’m a dead man.

No, if he told her that, she would want to
know everything. And if he laid it all out, what would she think of
him? If he told her the crash had been his fault, that he had
ordered the maintenance records falsified, that he had perjured
himself before the NTSB, that blood was on his hands, would she
help him? Maybe, if he told her the spot he was in.

Oh, he could rationalize it. Every airline
cuts corners. It didn’t take Mary Schiavo, the big-mouth blonde
from the Department of Transportation, to tell him that airlines
would rather have their insurers pay off wrongful death verdicts
than spend the money to fix known dangers. Simple cost-benefit
economics, babe.

He just never thought it would happen to him,
to his airline. And he never expected the guilt, the nightmares,
the pills, the late-night sweats.

No, he could never tell Lisa the truth. He
tried a different approach. “Why do you think we’ve been together
so long?”

“Inertia, Max. We’re used to each other.”

“No. Because deep down inside, we’re alike,”
he said.

“If that’s supposed to be a compliment—”

“We both see things the way they really are.
We take the cards we’re dealt, and if it means sliding an extra ace
up the sleeve to get what we want, then damn it, we do it. We don’t
play by somebody else’s rules.”

“That’s not the way I see myself,” she said,
sounding defensive, a measure of doubt creeping into her voice.

“A leopard can’t change her spots,” he said
with a smirk.

“I didn’t cheat in college or law school,”
she said angrily. “I worked like hell in the appellate clerkship.
I’m proud of my accomplishments. I’m proud of who I am.”