The Tolling of Mercedes Bell: A Novel (4 page)

Just then, car tires squealed loudly around a corner, followed by gunshots, men shouting, more tires squealing, and the roar of engines speeding away.
No, we don’t live in Piedmont anymore.
Within moments, Germaine slipped into bed beside her. Mercedes curled around the child, calming her as quiet settled again over the neighborhood.

M
ercedes reviewed the transcript in front of her and continued dictating her summary. Lindsay was on the phone with a court clerk and Simone was organizing documents. The three paralegals, each in a cubicle, shared a room with one unoccupied work station. After seven months, Mercedes was well settled into the firm’s routines.

Darrel Crenshaw’s secretary, Louise, entered the room, gave Mercedes a quick once-over, and handed her a file. “Darrel wants to see you in the conference room,” she whispered. “Take this with you.”

“I thought he was in a deposition this morning,” Mercedes replied quizzically as she took the file.

“He is. The deposition’s here. He wants you to join them right away.”

Mercedes’s eyebrows rose in surprise, and she quickly left her desk.

The people in the conference room were taking a break. The court reporter was loading more paper into her machine, and Darrel
sat at the table between two men. He was large and robust, with a broad chest and wide, straight shoulders. He looked up expectantly as she entered, then signaled for her to come closer. As Mercedes leaned over to give him the file, Darrel cupped his hand around his bearded mouth and whispered into her ear. “I want you to sit in and watch. Take notes and give me your impression of this witness. She’s out with her attorney right now, but when the deposition resumes, pay close attention. Sit where you can watch all of her.”

Darrel’s auburn eyebrows graced an unlined forehead. His was the face of a good man with a clean conscience. His expression told her that he suspected something and needed another pair of eyes to confirm it.

He introduced her to the two men sitting with him: Mr. Constantine, the insurance company representative from whom the firm got many of its cases, and Mr. Dailey, the defendant. Dailey was a bilious-looking man in his late sixties, with a few strands of dyed hair stretched over his balding pate in a futile attempt to conceal the obvious. Darrel pulled documents out of the file and reviewed them with Constantine, a rotund man in a tawdry suit. They looked at each other and both nodded slightly.

Out in the hallway, an extremely tall, debonair gentleman in a midnight blue silk suit approached the doorway, accompanying a blond woman in black. His movements were smooth and catlike. He seemed both relaxed and keenly aware. He looked to be in his late thirties, with silver appearing at the temples of his luxuriant dark hair. He extended an arm around his client, who was a dumpy, middle-aged woman with her hair piled high in a meringue-like bouffant. She looked tense and anxious. Her earrings bobbled as she nodded in response to his whispers.

When they entered the room, Darrel introduced Mercedes to the plaintiff, Emily Fredericks, and her lawyer, Mr. Jack Soutane.

Jack smiled. Laugh lines creased his handsome face and he nodded slightly, looking at her with intense blue eyes. “The more the merrier,” he said in a deep voice.

Mercedes gave him a deferential nod and sat down. She pulled out her notepad and looked toward Darrel, who was about to resume questioning. She had a full view of Emily, above and below the table.

Darrel’s examination proceeded. Some years earlier Miss Fredericks had approached another lawyer, Milton Dailey, to represent her in a civil suit against her former boyfriend, Jason Greer. She had provided Mr. Dailey with medical and financial records, and the names of witnesses who could testify on her behalf.

She and Jason had lived together for several years, well past the life of their romance. Things had turned sour, then bitter. He absconded with her inheritance, a small fortune, then joined the People’s Temple in San Francisco, led by the infamous Reverend Jim Jones.

A few months later, Emily met Mr. Dailey at a wedding. He took an interest in her story. He assured her that he could track down Jason and recover her assets, so she hired him.

Within the year, Jim Jones had led his followers on their ill-fated exodus to Guyana. Emily believed that Jason was among them and had taken part in the mass suicide. She’d never heard from him again or been able to find him, and all her money was gone.

Emily asserted that Mr. Dailey had not investigated the facts or filed a lawsuit, as he promised he would. She had called his office repeatedly, with no response, and now the statute of limitations had passed. She was distraught—first robbed by her boyfriend, then deceived by her lawyer.

She’d given up hope of restitution until she met Mr. Soutane. He convinced her that she might still be able to recover everything from an insurance carrier, assuming that her previous attorney had malpractice
coverage. He promptly hired a private investigator, then filed suit against Dailey.

By Emily’s account, everyone who betrayed her got away with it. She wanted remuneration for her lost inheritance, for Dailey’s negligence, and for emotional distress.

Mercedes could see that she was genuinely distressed. Her moon-shaped face was badly scarred from adolescent acne, which she tried to conceal with heavy makeup. Thick black mascara was caked onto her eyelashes and her plucked eyebrows had been weirdly redrawn with reddish eyebrow pencil. It was as if Emily wore a mask. Her eyes jumped around during questioning to avoid contact with anyone except her lawyer. She gripped a cheap patent-leather handbag in her lap under the table, nervously opening and closing the clasp as she testified.

“When you said you were incapacitated, Ms. Fredericks, what exactly did you mean by that?” Darrel inquired. He sat forward in his chair and tilted his head slightly.

“I mean that, after all that happened between me and Jason, I was not in very good shape when I met Mr. Dailey.”

“What do you mean by ‘not in very good shape’?”

“I was having a lot of trouble coping, getting through the day. Jason had been very abusive. After he left, I came unglued.”

“Could you please describe the abuse?”

Soutane asked for a moment off the record and whispered to her. She nodded and looked back at Darrel.

“We used to fight a lot. He always had to be the boss. He got mad real easy and called me horrible names. He also hit me.”

Mercedes looked under the table to see Emily let go of the handbag and grip the edge of her seat.

“How many times did Jason hit you?”

“Twice—he hit me twice.” Emily dug her nails into the cording on the chair cushion.

“Can you describe those incidents for us?”

She mentioned two exchanges in which Jason had slapped her and forced her down into a chair during an argument. He had never broken her skin, but she had felt terrified. Mercedes watched Emily’s hands clinging to the chair. Her knuckles whitened, though she carried on with a steady voice.

“Did anyone ever slap you before these incidents?”

“No.”

“Did anyone ever push you down in a chair before these incidents?”

“No.”

“Were you afraid that Jason would do this again?”

“I don’t know. I suppose so.”

“Is there any history of violence in your family?”

Soutane objected and instructed his client not to answer.

“Jack, your client is claiming emotional distress damages. I think we have a right to know her background and history in this area.”

“Yes, Darrel, but that doesn’t entitle you to ask about every unpleasant experience she’s had in her life,” he replied flatly.

“Agreed, nor have I done so,” Darrel snapped. Emily released her grip on the chair.

“Are you currently employed, Ms. Fredericks?”

“I was a bank teller,” she said. “But after Jason left I had a lot of trouble concentrating, and sleeping, and getting to work on time. Eventually I was let go. I had a breakdown, I guess you could say.”

“Have you worked at any other jobs since being fired?”

“No.”

“Have you ever sought treatment by a mental health professional?”

Emily looked worriedly at Soutane, who kept a poker face.

“No,” she said quietly.

Jason slapped her twice.
Mercedes shook her head slightly as she
wrote the words.
No longer able to work. Breakdown.
Mercedes had lost count of all the times Eddy screamed at her, smacked her, and terrorized her. If anything, her ability to concentrate on getting out had increased the more her marriage deteriorated. Something about Emily did not add up.

Noon recess was called. Darrel whispered that he’d talk to her after lunch, before the afternoon session. She felt Jack Soutane’s eyes on her as she exited the room.

She went outside with her lunch and headed down toward a bench by the lake. The office building next door was being renovated; the carpenters on the roof were taking off their tool bags and opening their lunch boxes. Sunlight filtered through a thinning haze. She watched brown pelicans glide low across the surface of the lake. Joggers ran past as she ate her peanut butter sandwich.

Then she realized what it was about Emily Fredericks that had bothered her.

Darrel was on the phone when she returned to the office. He motioned for her to come in and take a seat.

“So,” he said as he hung up the phone, “what do you think?”

“I noticed that every time you asked her about abuse, she stopped fidgeting with her handbag and gripped her chair. The subject of abuse obviously triggers something in her. I don’t think she’s faking. But I have a hard time believing that being slapped twice could be so traumatic that she wouldn’t be able to hold a job.”

“I agree, it seems disproportionate.”

“What if she’s hiding something so humiliating she’s never admitted it to anyone before?”

“That would be interesting.” He scratched his chin whiskers. “Not much gets past Soutane. This isn’t our first case against each other. I want you to watch the afternoon session.”

In the afternoon testimony, whenever Darrel attempted to learn
more about Emily’s family life or first marriage, Jack stopped him with an objection. By the end of the day the witness had succeeded in presenting a picture of herself as a hapless victim. She had also disclosed that her wealthy father was supporting her. It seemed a little too tidy to Mercedes. Life was messier than that.

The next morning, Mercedes sat at her desk studying her notes. She felt strongly that something had happened to Emily in the past—something so severe that Jason’s relatively mild actions had set off a chain reaction. She wrote her memo, submitted it, and heard nothing more about it for a while.

S
OME WEEKS LATER,
Darrel’s secretary again appeared at Mercedes’s desk. Louise always managed to seem unruffled no matter how hectic the office became. She exuded a maternal concern and her presence was very soothing.
Eleanor missed that gene entirely,
Mercedes mused.

“Looks like we’re going to trial,” Louise said. “The boss wants to see you.”

In his office, Darrel was pacing behind his massive mahogany desk, notably agitated. In front of the desk were two upholstered chairs, one of which was occupied by Stuart Leland, the well-spoken senior associate. She took the other.

Mercedes looked over at Stuart’s notes. He had filled the top sheet of his legal pad with a very small slanted cursive, written in fine point. He twirled his pen and looked up at Darrel. Mercedes’s pulse quickened with the tension in the room. She had not seen Darrel in this mood before.

“The Fredericks case has taken a turn for the worse,” he announced sternly. “Mr. Dailey’s insurance carrier has rejected our evaluation out of hand and is refusing to let us counter Plaintiff’s settlement
demand with anything in shouting distance of what she’s seeking. I’ll extend a counteroffer, but Jack Soutane will laugh in my face.”

Turning to Mercedes with a wry half smile, he said, “I thought you’d like to know that this is partly
your
doing. If you hadn’t written that memo, we would never have investigated or learned what we’ve learned. I was skeptical at first, but I couldn’t dismiss what you’d written. So we hired an investigator, who talked to quite a few people, and Stuart went through all the medical records we acquired. We found evidence that Ms. Fredericks
has
had problems that point to childhood abuse, possibly incest.”

Mercedes lifted her eyebrows but said nothing.

Darrel continued. “Somehow you sensed that her responses during the deposition were out of proportion to her story about Jason, but typical for someone with her history. We agree now that even if she
is
concealing something, she’s telling the truth about the effect of Dailey’s failure to do anything on her behalf, even though Constantine, the insurance rep, doesn’t. So, kudos to you, Mercedes.”

“So what happens now?” she asked. Her pulse quickened.