Solomon & Lord Drop Anchor (22 page)

“Dean’s list doesn’t mean shit in the real
world, Lisa. You got good grades? Big fucking deal. I got MBAs from
Harvard making my coffee. Sometimes I wonder where you get off. I
mean, Christ, I remember where you came from. I remember the
bartender. I remember the bruises.”

* * *

She remembered, too. Crockett was the
day-shift bouncer and occasional bartender, a ponytailed
bodybuilder with a hot temper and delusions that he was the next
Arnold Schwarzenegger. She’d moved in with him a week after the
one-way journey south from Bodega Bay, and he’d gotten her the
phony ID and the job at the Tiki Club. She gave Crockett her tips,
but they were never enough to pay for his hash and steroids.

“Some guys I know are having a party
tonight,” he told her one day as she was leaving for the club.

“What guys?” she asked.

“Businessmen from out of town. They got a
room at the Ramada by the airport.”

“So you want to go?”

“Not me! Ain’t my ass they wanna see.”

“I don’t do private parties. Sheila told
me—”

“Sheila don’t know shit. Who’d pay to see her
saggy tits? This is four hundred plus tips.”

Lisa was shaking her head when he grabbed
her, his huge hands digging into the flesh of her upper arms. She
tried to twist away, but he held on, pressing harder, slamming her
into the wall but never letting go, using his size and strength
just as her father had done to imprison her and break her will.

“I put a roof over your head,” Crockett said.
“I get you a job. I protect your ass from guys who’d slice you up
and eat you for breakfast. You fucking owe me!”

Thinking back now, here it was again.

Max, Crockett, dear old Dad. How many men do
I owe?

She went to the motel that night, carrying a
boom box, getting paid up front, then stripping for three drunken
salesmen, all the time palming a miniature can of Mace, a trick
Sheila had taught her. One of the scumbags, a paunchy
forty-five-year-old wearing a wedding band, lunged for her. She
sidestepped him, and when the other two tried to tackle her, she
sprayed one squarely in his open, dumb mouth and kneed the other in
the groin, a direct shot that sent him tumbling to the floor,
vomiting.

The first man took a wild swing at her and
missed. Lisa turned to run for the door, but he tripped her, then
dragged her to the floor, clawing at her thong, drawing blood from
her hip with his fingernails. He was about her father’s age, and
those memories, so fresh then, came racing back, filling her with
fear. She had vowed it would never happen again.

I’d kill a man before I’d let him …

She was on her back with the man above her
when she worked an arm free and hit him with a blast of the Mace.
He howled and toppled backward, his hands tearing at his eyes. Lisa
scrambled to her feet, picked up a table lamp, and bashed it across
his forehead, quieting him. Adrenaline pumping, she made it out of
the motel room with her backpack and money but left the boom box
behind.

“Dumb bitch!” Crockett yelled when she got
home, backhanding her across the face, cursing her a second time
when he counted the money, discovering the roll of bills was really
a single twenty on top with nineteen two-dollar bills underneath.
“Stupid jailbait bitch!”

Three nights later, Max Wanaker rode up to
the Tiki on his white horse or was it a white limo? Whatever his
flaws, Lisa now knew he had rescued her. She had been one step away
from the streets. Cocktail waitress, stripper … hooker was not far
behind. Max seemed to know everything in those days. He saw right
through the Dermablend makeup she used to cover the bruises.

“Who did this to you?” he had asked.

“My boyfriend, but he didn’t mean to hurt
me.”

“Where can I find him?” Max asked.

Even now, she could remember his voice. Grim
and determined.

Where can I find him?

It would be that simple. No further
explanation needed. She knew Max wouldn’t do it himself. The soft
hands and manicured nails did not belong to a thug. But he knew
people, had dealt with the Teamsters. In Max’s world, everything
could be arranged. She saw the bartender only once more. He was
trying to get up Russian Hill on crutches.

Yes, Max, I owe you, but maybe that makes me
resent you even more.

“Sometimes you really piss me off,” she
said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, backing off, sounding
sincere. “You know how I feel about you …”

How? Say it!

How many times had he said the three magic
words? Twice, she recalled, once after too much champagne and once
when he thought he’d lost her.

In fact, you did lose me, Max. I was tired
of sneaking in and out of hotels.

She had just started law school and felt like
she was getting somewhere. So why was she stuck in this nowhere
relationship? She wanted her independence, and Max was surprisingly
understanding. He gave her time and space. He was secure enough to
let her go, telling her he hoped she would return.

It was the best time of her life. She found
Tony Kingston, or rather, he had found her. Discovered the
baby-sitter had grown up. Lisa had taken care of Greg, Tony’s son,
since she was twelve, helping around the house, admiring the photos
of the handsome naval aviator in his spiffy flightsuit. Tony had
never been married, and when the child’s mother—Tony’s teenage
girlfriend—took off, he was left with a son to raise. Lisa
remembered her adolescent excitement when Tony came home on leave,
duffel bag slung over a shoulder.

So strong and decent, so unlike my own
father.

She learned enough psychology to know Tony
was the father she had never had. But he was so much more, too.
Tony didn’t rescue her as Max had done; he treated her as an equal,
something Max never did. Tony was everything. And then, suddenly,
he was gone.

Just as Max had hoped, she came back. He told
her she had changed, that he liked the old Lisa better. The old
Lisa is dead, she said. He didn’t ask who she had been with, and
she never told. The past and the future both remained unspoken.

Now, pacing in the apartment overlooking the
park, he said, “I’d leave Jill for you in a second if you’d ask me
to …”

She let the bait dangle. Ten years ago, she
prayed to hear those words. Now, they left her confused and
troubled.

“God, Lisa, I love you. I always have.”

Whoa! What did he say? And why now?

“Do you love me, Max, or do you just need me
more?”

“When the case is over, I’m going to ask Jill
for a divorce and we can get married.”

“Max, please …”

“Okay, I won’t pressure you. But you’re right
about one thing. I need your help. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.
Hell, I’m begging you. This is even more important than you
know.”

“Tell me.”

“I can’t. Not now.”

She thought about it. Hard as it was for Max
to say it, he did love her. She never doubted it. And he had helped
her when no one else cared whether she slept under a bridge or went
hungry. Now he was asking her to choose between him and some
flowery notions of right and wrong.

No one would ever know. It was just one
case.

But what about her beliefs? What about the
new, improved Lisa Fremont, to use Max’s mocking phrase? Could she
put her new ideals on the shelf just this once? And how deeply did
she believe them anyway?

The marble statues and bronze doors
notwithstanding, justice was an ethereal concept, a divine ideal,
which like sainthood was rarely seen on earth. Justice was the
pearl in the oyster. Keep on shuckin’ and good luck huntin’.
Despite the lofty notions she’d learned from the law books, her
views were shaped by her own experiences. Weren’t everyone’s? What
was it Justice Cardozo had said? “Try as we might, we can never see
with any eyes except our own.”

And what my eyes have seen.

Now, after four years at Berkeley, summa cum
laude—thank you very much—three years at Stanford Law, magna cum
laude with a prize-winning law review note, and one year clerking
for a federal court of appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit, she had
all the credentials. So why did she consider herself a fraud?

She wanted to believe, but damnit, Max had
pressed the right buttons. She was a priest without faith, a pagan
inside the holy tabernacle. To Lisa Fremont, the law was not
majestic. The slogan carved into the pediment—equal justice under
law—was a benediction for the Kodak-toting tourists. The law was as
cold as the marble of its sanctuary.

Disregarding the lofty symbols and images,
she thought of the legal system as a dingy factory with leaking
boilers, broken sprockets, and rusted cogs. The law was bought and
sold, swapped and hocked, bartered and auctioned, just like wheat,
widgets … and girls who run away from home.

In the upcoming term, she knew the Court
would be asked to consider nearly seven thousand cases but would
issue fewer than one hundred rulings. Law clerks, whose first
function was to summarize and analyze the petitions seeking review,
frequently complained about the workload. No problem, Lisa
thought.

If I get the job, I’ll read them all. I’ll
plow through the research, draft the justice’s opinions, and make
his coffee, if that’s what he wants me to do.

She’d know the legislative history of the
statutes and the precedential value of the cases. She’d master the
procedure and the substantive law. She’d write pithy footnotes and
trace the source of a law back to Hammurabi. She’d prepare incisive
pool memos for the judicial conferences and brilliant bench memos
for her boss. She’d stay up all night with the death clerk on
execution stays, and she’d be at work at 8 A.M. sharp.

She’d be prepared to search for the truth, to
do justice.

She’d do all of those things in every case …
except one.

The case of 
Laubach v. Atlantica
Airlines, Inc.
, would be different. She already had read the
file. She knew the issues and the arguments on both sides. Even
more important, she knew who had to win.

* * *

“I’ll do it, Max. I’ll do it for you.”

“Great! I knew you wouldn’t let me down.” The
tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. “We make a
great team, Lisa.

When your clerkship’s up, you should come
into the airline’s legal department. Pete Flaherty’s going to
retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general
counsel?”

“Max, please stop planning my life. Let’s
just get through this.”

“Whatever you say, darling.”

His smile was still in place. He had done it.
And he hadn’t even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew
that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have
rushed to help him. But this way was better.

She’s doing it for love, not pity.

Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more
to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her
judge—the swing vote, according to Flaherty—to go their way. But he
had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a
thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was
trusting her with his life.

* * *

Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the
liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping
darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa
confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had
asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn’t
know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was
never part of the bargain.

She would do it because her loyalty to Max
outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all
along.

She didn’t believe in the words carved into
stone.

Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as
icy.

Deep inside, she was just like him.

* * *

NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF
CRASH

WASHINGTON D.C.—(AP) The National
Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not
conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines
Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash
in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.

Citing contradictory evidence and the
failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a
lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused
the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami
International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane
pointedly stated that there was “substantial evidence” to support
the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the
tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever
the hydraulic lines.

“
Traces of PETN were
recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of
the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not
found,” McGrane said. “Presumably, they are buried in the muck of
the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we
cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive
conclusion.”

PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a
component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no
evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of
flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the
number two engine.

Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed
frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about
the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy
jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station.
He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant
heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None
of the jets reported firing a missile.

Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile
group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica
Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter
flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La
Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting
anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after
climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport.
The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the
New York-to-Miami flight.