Compelling Evidence

CHAPTER 13

I’m rummaging through the house trying to pick up before Sarah’s birthday party. Nikki has graciously consented to have the festivities here at the house with all of my daughter’s little friends. I am dusting the sofa-back table and my gaze fixes on it, the picture of Nikki and me in happier days, before we were married.

I think back to the first time I saw her, standing there next to the campus pool, a biology text under her arm, wearing a skimpy bikini that left little to the imagination. I knew I was in love. I listened to her animated conversation, watched the tilt of her head in the bright sun as she talked with friends, and felt a charge of hormones whenever she giggled.

Then, her hair was light, streaked with gold from the sun, not the salt-and-pepper that came later, after years of marriage and a child. She wore it long and straight, flipped under at the ends, her fingers constantly sweeping it back behind one ear. She cut an image of unmistakable class. Nikki, tanned like a bronze goddess, just a few freckles on the cheeks like the dappled spots on a fawn.

Word was out in the circle in which I ran that I was smitten. I would follow her to the library and jockey for a study carrel close so I could watch her. One evening I saw her return to the dorm after a date with another guy. He was tall and poised-and rich. I watched as he walked her from his gleaming Corvette to the door. Then I saw her peck him on the lips, a good-night kiss. I felt a great weight sagging in my chest, as if my heart were suddenly pumping lead.

One evening, after weeks of watching in silent pain, I gathered my courage, marched to the library, to the inside bridge over the foyer, approached Nikki and asked, in a voice that cracked with indecision and the fear of failure, if anyone was occupying the lounge chair beside hers. She looked at me, confident, and said simply, “No.” Then, smiling, she patted the seat with her hand, offering me a place to sit as if somehow I was expected.

That evening we walked back to the dorms together under a canopy of redwoods sprinkled with openings revealing stars and the night-sky haze of the Milky Way. We stopped at the coffee house by the bookstore. I gained more confidence as she laughed, seemingly amused by the innocuous little things I said. And as we left the place, odors of spice and espresso mingling with the fragrance of cedars and redwood, my hand found hers, waiting and warm.

In the days that followed I sensed, in the titter of her female friends when we were together, that I’d been an item with this group of giddy girls before my campaign with Nikki in the library. In this thought there was pleasure, a satisfaction that my long-laboring fantasies of this golden girl had in fact been mutual.

Not all of this mystery and desire is gone. Even now, Nikki is her most sensual when she’s angry, as she is this moment with me.

“How can you do this? You’re a bastard, you know that?” Her hands are on her hips; her legs still slender and strong, she stands in front of me blocking the hall to the kitchen, her lower body molded in a pair of skin-tight jeans.

I jockey to get around her. My hands are filled with paper plates of half-eaten birthday cake and dribbling ice cream.

“She’s a client,” I tell her, my voice low so the others out in the living room won’t hear.

“Spare me,” she says.

My peace offering, it seems, has gone sour. My invitation to have Sarah’s birthday party here in the more spacious house which had been our home before Nikki left me is being wrecked by the news that I’m now representing Talia. It hit the papers that morning, and Nikki’s been on my case like a heat-seeking missile since she arrived.

‘Talia’s a client,” I say.

“Is that what they call it these days? Coulda fooled me. I thought she was your concubine.” Nikki’s not so discreet, her voice at full volume. Her friends, mothers of little children back in the other room, are getting an earful. She backs into the kitchen, hands still on her hips.

“The woman is charged with murder. The firm asked me to take a hand in her defense. That’s all there is to it.”

“You don’t even bother to deny it, that you had an affair with her.” She’s blocking the way to the trash can, and ice cream is beginning to drip from the plates in my hands onto the floor.

It’s a tactical blunder. My failure to deny Nikki’s charge that I consorted with Talia carries with it the seeds of an open admission. Mentally I bite my tongue.

“What do you want me to say?” I tell her.

“That you’re not going to represent her.”

“I can’t do that. I’ve already agreed to take the case.”

“Tell ’em you’ve changed your mind.”

“This isn’t some shopping spree to the mall.”

Her eyes are burning now, two pieces of white-hot coal. “Fuck you!”

Profanity is something that Nikki reserves for those ultimate moments of excess fury in life. Here it is said with volume and intensity. I have visions of three-year-olds down the hall roosting on their mother’s knees and asking with innocent, upturned eyes,

“What does ‘fuck’ mean, Mommie?”

“Listen, can we talk about this later?”

“No. We’ll talk about it now. Later I’m leaving-with Sarah.

I want the truth. Did you have an affair with her?”

I hesitate for a moment. But there’s no use lying. In her own mind Nikki’s already condemned me.

“Yes, we went out.”

“You what? You went out” she says. She laughs. My wife has a special talent for mockery. “Call it what it is, you asshole.”

There’s a good deal of fury tonight.

“OK, we had an affair-but it was after you left me.” This somehow eases the blame for my infidelity, at least in my own mind.

But not in Nikki’s. “So it doesn’t count, is that it?” she says.

“Before we broke up, she was nothing. She’s nothing now. It’s over,” I tell her. “What’s between us now is business, the representation of a client charged with first-degree murder, nothing more.”

“You bastard.” She repeats the charge, but now she’s crying. There’s an extra shot of acid in my stomach.

“We need to talk,” I tell her.

She’s huddled over the sink, crying and wiping her eyes with a wet dishrag. As much as she knew it, suspected it, the open admission of my affair with Talia crushes Nikki.

“Listen to me.” I touch her shoulder. She pulls away.

I tell her that she has to give me a chance, that she has to hear me out.

“I have a party to get back to,” she says and leaves the room, sniffling away tears. I see her stopped in the dark hall, halfway down, composing herself. Then she plunges into the room. “Well, time to open presents.” Her voice is all cheer, but thick like a cold.

And so we put a face on it for the women waiting in the other room and pretend that nothing has happened-until they leave.

Nikki and I sit alone in the ebbing light of evening, in the living room which has been ravaged by a half-dozen partying children. Shreds of wrapping paper and ribbon litter the floor. Empty coffee cups in saucers sit on the sofa-side tables. Sarah is in her old bedroom, which is now barren of any furnishings, playing with her gifts, new toys.

“Regardless of what you think about her,” I say, “she didn’t kill Ben.”

“You’re sure of that?”

I nod confidently, like some prairie farmer predicting rain.

“I see. Lover’s intuition.” Sarcasm has taken the place of Nikki’s tears.

“Years of dealing cases,” I say. “Talia didn’t kill Ben Potter any more than you or I did.”

“Even if you’re right, somebody else could defend her.”

“Somebody else is defending her. Guy by the name of Cheetam. I’m there only as Keenan counsel, to assist him, that’s all.”

“And he asked you?”

“As a matter of fact he did. They were in a bind. The man’s from out of town. He needed somebody fast; Skarpellos recommended me.”

I don’t tell her that Talia planted this seed. Nikki’s hostility, like a dying battery, is running down now. She has a difficult time staying angry. She has always had to work hard maintaining a constant pitch to her ire. Fury, it seems, always came too quickly, spending itself in an emotional weariness.

“But you could get out of it if you wanted to.”

I shake my head. “It’s too late.”

I take the time to explain in soothing tones that I’ve already filed discovery motions in the case. This makes me counsel of record. To withdraw now would require a formal substitution of counsel, or the consent of the court. We’re too close to the preliminary hearing to get either.

“If I’d known you felt this way, I wouldn’t have taken the case. But it’s too late.”

“How did you think I’d feel? You’re rubbing my nose in your affair. Now you tell me it’s too late. Seems that your commitment to her is just a little more important than your concern for us.”

“I didn’t think,” I say. I hope that this final confession will kill it.

She sits demure at the other end of the couch, her behind on the edge, knees pressed together, hands folded tightly in her lap, as she drops the bomb.

“Still, isn’t there some kind of conflict?” she says.

I play stupid. “Whadda you mean?”

There’s a little exasperation in her eyes. “I mean, it’s not normal for a lawyer to be fucking his client, is it?”

“I told you it’s over.”

“I see,” she says. “If it’s in the past tense-if the lawyer has fucked his client, it’s all right.”

She leaves me with the ethical conundrum as she rises from the couch.

“Listen. When this is over maybe we can get together, the three of us for a weekend over on the coast. Like we used to,” I say.

“Fat chance,” she says.

She lets me know that I’ve wasted my time changing the sheets on my bed, a hopeful preliminary to a night together after a happy birthday party. Nikki’s moving toward the back of the house, calling Sarah, getting ready to leave.

“You won’t mind if I don’t stick around to help you clean up the mess.” She looks at me with a sobering expression. Like so much of what she says to me these days, her words carry some intended double meaning.

“I can handle it.”

“Let’s hope so.”