Beauty and the Beast

6

I did not get to see Kitty Reynolds, the woman named in Sally’s divorce action, until four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Guilt kept me chained to my office desk. Guilt and Frank’s dark scowl. Guilt and a pressing number of duties that had to be performed for a varied number of clients before a deadline defined by the holiday tomorrow and my imminent departure on Friday for the nine-day vacation that would end the following Saturday, but that would nonetheless keep me out of the office till Monday, December 7.

My first call that morning was from a client named Mark Portieri.

“Mark,” I said into the phone, “how are you?”

“Lousy,” he said.

“What’s wrong?”

“I want a new will.”

“Another one?” I said, surprised. “Why?”

“To make sure she doesn’t get a nickel.”

“Who?” I said.

“Janie,” he said.

Janie was his former wife. The firm of Summerville and Hope had handled the divorce for Mark only six months ago, and had since drawn a new will for him that excluded his former wife from the list of beneficiaries.

“But she’s no longer named in the will,” I said.

“I know that. Still, I want a specific provision saying she won’t get a penny when I die.”

“You don’t need such a provision,” I said. “If she isn’t named—”

“I want it in there.”

“Mark,” I said, “you’re under no obligation to leave anything to your former wife. If the will doesn’t name her, she has no possible claim...”

“When the will is read out loud,” he said, “when everybody gathers to hear it read out loud, I want the words in there. I want it to say, ‘And to my former wife Jane Portieri, I leave nothing at all!’ ”

“Okay,” I said, and sighed. He was thinking about one of those Hollywood scenes where the entire family congregates in some dusty office to hear an ancient lawyer read a will aloud. In real life, the beneficiaries of a will are normally informed by telephone or mail that they’re about to inherit a large sum of money or a house in Bermuda or a goldfish in a tank. “But think over what I just said, okay? I hate to put you to unnecessary legal expense when, really, you’re adequately—”

“I want that will changed, Matthew!” he shouted, and hung up.

Cynthia buzzed again to say that a man named Abner Fieldston — whose name I remembered from yesterday’s telephone messages — was outside and wondered if he could have a moment of my time. I asked her to show him in. The wall clock read 9:30.

Fieldston was a black man in his midseventies, who told me he’d been born in a small town in Mississippi at a time when the authorities weren’t keeping vital statistics records on blacks. He told me he didn’t have a birth certificate. “I’m getting on in years,” he said, “and I doan even have a certificate of my own birth. Can you get me a birth certificate?”

“Not if one doesn’t exist,” I said.

“Then what am I spose to do?”

“Well, there are other ways of establishing your birth and obtaining the equivalent of a birth certificate.”

“You mean it?” he said, and broke into a wide toothless grin.

“Are your mother or father still alive?”

“No,” he said, and the grin dropped from his face.

“Do you have any older brothers or sisters who are aware of the date and—”

“I’m an only child,” he said.

“How about any aunts or uncles who might know when and where you were born?”

“Aunt Mercy was there at the actual birthing,” he said. “She was midwife to my mother.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How old is she, Mr. Fieldston?”

“Ninety-eight,” he said.

“Still of sound mind?”

“Sharp as a needle,” he said.

“Let me have her name and address,” I said. “I’ll arrange for an affidavit to be mailed to her.”

“Will that make me legal?” he asked, and grinned again.

“You’ve been legal all along,” I said, and returned his smile.

At a quarter to ten, I began returning some of the calls that had piled up the day before. The first call I made was to a client named Hal Ashton, né Harold Ashkenazy, who was an Equity actor appearing in a production of The Time of Your Life at the Candlelight Club, one of Calusa’s dinner theaters. In the dark, during the curtain calls two nights ago, he had tripped on one of the set’s barstools and broken his collarbone. He wanted to know if he could sue the owner of the place.

“Which place?” I said. “The Candlelight Club, or Nick’s Pacific Street Saloon?”

“Hey, how come you know the name of the bar?” he asked, pleased. “Did you come see the show?”

“I was in it,” I said.

“What? What do you mean?”

“In college.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Would one old actor kid another?”

“Who’d you play?”

“Blick. The vice-squad cop.”

“He’s the heavy!” Hal said.

“Somebody has to play the heavies,” I said.

“So can I sue or not?” he asked, dismissing my past, brief, illustrious acting career.

“This sounds like a worker’s compensation matter,” I said. “Have you got a pencil?”

“Shoot.”

“Give this man a call,” I said, “tell him I referred you. He’s an attorney who specializes in such claims.”

“Worker’s compensation, huh?” Hal said, disappointed, and then took down the name I gave him.

Cynthia buzzed the moment I hung up.

“Your daughter’s on five,” she said.

I stabbed at the button in the base of the phone.

“Hi, sweetie,” I said.

“Dad, I have to make this fast because I’m in study hall. Mom wants to know should I pack before I come to your house tomorrow, or should I pack later on in the day?”

“What do you mean, later on in the day?”

“I promised her I’d come home for a little while, after the turkey, I mean. Would that be okay? ’Cause I’ll be going to Mexico, and I won’t be seeing her for a whole nine days.”

“Sure, that’s fine. But you’d better pack before, okay? What time did you tell her you’d be back?”

“I said after dinner sometime, is that okay?”

“Fine.”

“Okay, Pops,” she said, and hung up.

She rarely called me “Pops.” I looked at the receiver in wonder, pressed the receiver-rest button for a dial tone, and then — reminded of tomorrow’s festivities by my daughter — placed a call to Dale O’Brien at the law offices of Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield, and Pollock.

“Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield, and Pollock,” the telephone receptionist said.

“Dale O’Brien, please,” I said.

“May I say who’s calling?”

“Matthew Hope.”

I waited.

“Hello, Mr. Hope?” a woman’s voice said. “This is Cathy, Ms. O’Brien’s secretary. I’m sorry, she’s in a meeting just now, can I have her get back to you?”

I looked up at the wall clock. It was only ten minutes past ten.

“I’ll be leaving here at about noon,” I said. “Ask her to call me before then, would you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said, and hung up.

Dale called back twenty minutes later.

“Hi,” she said, “how’s it going?”

“Miserably.”

“Poor baby,” she said. “Wait’ll you see the turkey I bought.”

Dale and my daughter had insisted, against my desire to liberate them from any kitchen chores tomorrow, on preparing an “old-fashioned” Thanksgiving dinner, complete with turkey and stuffing, roasted sweet potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce (“What’s the matter with the canned variety?” I’d asked), green beans, and deep-dish strawberry shortcake, not to mention the celery, olives, home-baked bread, and other assorted goodies that would precede or accompany the main course. I had told them we could do just as well in a restaurant, especially when there were such minor matters as packing to worry about. They had informed me, in something close to high dudgeon, that they would both be packed long before they began preparing the meal, and this was something they wanted to do, and I had better endure it because God knew what we’d be eating in Mexico. What we’d be eating in Mexico had been one of our major concerns. I had visited Jamie Phelps, my family doctor, a man for whom I’d once handled what had turned out to be my initial brush with a homicide case, and he’d prescribed for us a drug named Vibramycin, to be taken every morning as a preventative, and another drug named Lomotil, to be taken only if and when Montezuma’s Revenge struck any one of us. We were still a bit apprehensive. Reminded of dire illness, I suddenly thought of Dale’s cat.

“How’s Sassafras?” I asked.

“Fine,” Dale said. “She doesn’t have worms, they checked, and her fever’s completely gone. One of life’s little mysteries. What time will I be seeing you tonight?”

“Had you planned on staying over, or what?”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you come by straight from work?”

“No, I want to pack first. Let’s say eightish, okay?”

“I’ll see you then.”

Cynthia buzzed the moment I put down the phone.

“Honest Abe on five,” she said.

I picked up the phone again.

“Hello, Abe,” I said. “Why don’t we just put in a tie-line?”

Abe Pollock was one of the partners in Blackstone, Harris, Gerstein, Garfield, and Pollock, the firm with the longest name in town. He had no idea that I’d just finished a conversation with Dale, and was understandably baffled by my opening remark.

“Have we talked already today?” he asked.

“Inside joke,” I said.

“Don’t give me with inside jokes before lunch,” he said. “What’s this with your cockamamie client?”

“Which one?”

“The one who hired Okay Contracting to stucco his house.”

“Okay ain’t so okay,” I said.

“Meaning?”

“He hired them six months ago, Abe. Some of the work isn’t completed yet, and even what’s done has been done poorly. So now your man wants payment, and I’ll be damned if I’ll approve it until—”

“Have a heart, Matthew,” Abe said. “All Schultz is asking for is half what’s due.”

“Is he related to that other legendary gangster?”

“What? Who?”

“Dutch Schultz,” I said.

“Never heard of him.”

“Big Chicago gangster,” I said.

“You’re an even bigger Chicago gangster.” Abe said. “Tell your client to give him the half, willya? Get Schultz off my back for a while.”

“Not a penny, Abe. Not till the job is completed and the remedial work done to my client’s satisfaction.”

“Have a heart, Matthew,” Abe said.

“I’ll hold the balance of payment in escrow till then, how does that sound?”

“You don’t know Conrad Schultz.”

“I know his work, though.”

“Let me hold it in escrow, okay? He’ll feel safer that way.”

“Fine.”

“What?”

“I said fine, you can hold it in escrow.”

“Will wonders never?” Abe said.

“I’ll be out of the office next week, but I’ll make sure the check is sent to you.”

“Where you going?” Abe asked.

“Mexico.”

“Looks like every lawyer in Calusa is going to be in Mexico next week,” Abe said, and I could swear he was leering.

“Only two of us,” I said.

“Well, have a nice time,” he said. “And please don’t trouble yourself for even a minute about those of us in the legal profession who’ll be minding the store while you’re off frolicking in the sun.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Is that a promise? I wouldn’t want your vacation spoiled by undue guilt or remorse.”

“I promise. Abe, it’s been nice talking to you, but—”

“Send the check,” he said, and hung up.

My lunch date that afternoon was with three Calusa investors represented by our firm. Together, they owned a parcel of Sabal Key land on which they had planned to build 170 condominium units. The owner of the parcel next door to theirs planned to build no units on his land. But because of the vagaries of the zoning ordinance, if my clients and the man next door combined their two parcels, they’d be able to build — within the zoning restrictions and within the law — 300 units as opposed to the 280 if they’d proceeded separately. In unity, there is strength; there is also the two million bucks those additional twenty units, at a hundred thousand a throw, would bring into a combined entity. My three investor-clients wanted to form a joint venture with the man next door, and they wanted me to arrange a meeting with him and his attorney.

They were the dourest of men, these three, singularly intent on making money, determined to amass fortunes for themselves even if it meant manufacturing plastic vomit. (“There are the Vomit-Makers and the Dream-Makers,” my partner Frank is fond of saying, apropos of nothing.) It never once occurred to any of them that crowding an additional twenty units onto the parcels they and their neighbor owned, while within the law if they could pull off their merger, might contribute to the wall-to-wall condominium look Calusa was so desperately trying to avoid. Money was the be-all and the end-all, poor Sabal Key’s natural beauty be damned. They were grim and humorless men for the most part, and it was with some surprise that I listened to (and actually enjoyed) a joke one of them told, “a story a lawyer like you ought to appreciate,” he said before telling it.

It seemed that one of the recreation parks up Tampa way had recently put in a tank with two male porpoises in it, these to supplement the other wildlife roaming free over the park’s vast acreage. But it turned out that the porpoises had developed, of all things, an obscene letch for tender, young seagulls. In order to satisfy their yearning — and incidentally to keep them happy so they’d perform their little nonsexual stunts for the thousands of paying visitors who came to the park each day — the owner of the park had taken to secreting nubile seagulls into the tank each night, the better for the porpoises to indulge their appetites for youthful birds.

Well, on a moonless night several weeks back, the owner was sneaking onto the grounds a young and beautiful plump female seagull, carrying her in his hands up the path that led to the tank where the panting porpoises awaited their connubial sacrifice. (One was not supposed to ask, I gathered, how a pair of porpoises could possibly mate with a seagull.) As he moved stealthily forward, the owner of the park was startled by the sight of a lion sleeping across the only path that led to the tank. What to do? Hoping he would not awaken the lion, the owner stepped across his prone body, still carrying the young seagull in his arms, and a policeman came out of the bushes, brandishing a revolver and placing the man under arrest.

“Do you know what the charge was?” my client asked.

“What?”

“Carrying an Underage Gull Across a Sedate Lion for Immoral Porpoises,” he said, and burst out laughing.

I did not get back to the office until almost three o’clock. I returned all the calls that had accumulated while I was out, and then buzzed Karl Jennings and asked him if he could come in for a minute.

Karl was twenty-seven years old, a recent — well, two years ago — graduate of Harvard Law who had decided to begin practice in the South, where the living was easy and the cotton was high. As the youngest member of our firm, he often brought to any difficult case a fresh point of view sometimes sadly absent in middle-aged men like Frank and me. Middle-aged, yes. Or perhaps, if one wishes to stretch a point, already over the hill. I am thirty-eight years old, and I figure my life expectancy to be somewhere between seventy and seventy-five. Thirty-eight is half of seventy-six, so there you are: already over the hill. Karl always dressed for work as though he were about to attend a funeral, a sartorial legacy inherited from his banker father in Boston. He had also inherited from the pater familias a head of wiry blond hair, an unfortunate eagle’s beak, and very weak brown eyes magnified behind thick-lensed tortoise-framed eyeglasses. His voice was tinged with the unmistakable regional dialect one usually associated with members of the Kennedy clan. Cynthia cheerfully referred to him as “The Chairman of the Board.”

I told Karl about the conversation I’d had with Abe Pollock, and asked him to make certain our client wrote a check to Abe, as attorney for Okay Contracting, for transfer to Abe’s escrow account. Karl said he’d do that first thing Monday morning, when he got back to the office after the long holiday weekend. I then told him there was a man I wanted him to talk to while I was gone, a Mr. Harry Loomis at A&M Exxon on Wingdale and Pine. I wanted him to find out from Loomis everything he remembered about the morning George Harper went there to have his truck filled with gas, and especially what he remembered about selling him a five-gallon gasoline can and filling that for him as well.

“I’m specifically interested in learning why his fingerprints weren’t on that can,” I said. “Harper thinks he wasn’t wearing gloves, and he can’t remember whether or not Loomis wiped off the can. Find out.”

“Okay,” Karl said. “Anything else?”

“I’ve given Cynthia a Puerto Vallarta number where I can be reached. That’s until Monday night. On Tuesday we’ll be in Mexico City, at the Camino Real — Cynthia has that number, too.”

“Okay,” Karl said.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Have a nice time,” Karl said, and went out.

I picked up the phone and called Kitty Reynolds at work, telling her I was representing a man accused of murder, and asking if I might see her sometime that afternoon. She told me to come right over, and I was in Lucy’s Circle not twenty minutes later. It took me another ten minutes to find a parking space, however, and it was not until four that I paused on the sidewalk outside Miss Reynolds’s boutique, and looked up at the sign over the brimming front window.

The Circle, as it is familiarly known to Calusa’s residents and visitors, was indeed that — a wheel, the hub of which was a fair-sized park, the rim of which was lined by restaurants, jewelry stores, souvenir shops, a photography shop, a florist, an optical shop, a post office, several shops selling antiques, three art galleries, a cheese shop, two shoe stores for men, five shoe stores for women, a half dozen women’s clothing stores, a barbershop, several luncheonettes, three men’s clothing stores, a chocolate shop, an ice-cream shop, a store selling modern furniture, a pharmacy, a five-and-dime, a greeting-card shop, a shop selling oranges and grapefruits you could ship home to less fortunate people in Minnesota or Toronto, a luggage shop, a store selling furniture fashioned from redwood trees, a shop selling only earrings, and a discothèque that on Wednesday nights featured an act called “The Body Machine” (the rage of Calusa at the moment), wherein several male dancers performed a mild striptease to which only women were admitted.

The sign over the front plate-glass window of the boutique read KITTY CORNER. I decided at once that it had been inappropriately named. It was, to begin with, not on a corner — although there were some corners in the Circle, being fed as it was by side streets funneling into it — but was instead in the middle of the block, sandwiched between a shoe store and an art gallery. It was, secondly, and judging from the array of sexy lingerie, minuscule bikinis, and slinky dresses in the front window, not the sort of place selling anything even remotely warranting the adjective “kittenish.” And lastly, the name Kitty Corner seemed to suggest what the owner of a cat might have called the place under a stove where nestled a box full of torn paper scraps or the packaged, deodorized litter one could buy in any supermarket.

There was only one person in the shop when I entered it and closed the door behind me. She was, to be sure, a blonde who appeared to be in her midthirties, five feet six or thereabouts, weighing a well-curved 120, and wearing one of the more spectacular creations displayed in her front window, a satiny concoction slit to the thigh on one leg, and cut low over resplendent breasts that threatened the skintight fabric. I felt for a moment as though I’d wandered into Calusa’s Club Alyce, where ladies in scanty costumes danced at any male patron’s table, thrusting aggressive crotches into willing faces, for the price of a few dollar bills stuffed into their G-strings.

“Miss Reynolds?” I said.

“Yes?”

“I’m Matthew Hope. I phoned a little while—”

“Yes, how do you do, Mr. Hope?” she said, and walked toward me, her hand extended, a smile on her face, every curve of her body insinuating itself against the sleek shiny fabric of the dress she was almost wearing.

The dress was a pastel blue, a shade lighter than the color of her eyes. She was wearing a smoky gray eye shadow and a string of baroque pearls that lustrously echoed it. Her lipstick was the color of a pomegranate’s skin, glossily spread on bee-stung lips still parted in a smile. She took my hand in a delicate clasp; her palm was slightly moist. There was about her the lingering scent of a musky perfume.

“You said on the phone...”

“Yes, that I’m representing a man accused of murder, and I would appreciate your assistance.”

“But how?” she said, and released my hand.

“The man’s name is George Harper.”

“Yes?”

“He’s a friend of Andrew Owen.”

“Yes?” she said again.

I had the distinct impression that neither of the names meant anything at all to her. I had not expected her to know Harper. But after what I’d read in Sally Owen’s file—

“Andrew Owen,” I said again.

“Am I supposed to know either of these people?” she said.

“I thought you might have known Mr. Owen.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“He’s a black man who runs a liquor store on Third and Vine.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“Miss Reynolds, last year I handled a divorce case for a woman named Sally Owen. At the time, she was Mr. Owen’s wife.” I paused. Not the slightest flicker of recognition showed on her face. “Mrs. Owen named you as a witness in her action.”

“Me?” she said, her eyes opening wide.

“You are Kitty Reynolds, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“And you do live in an apartment over this store, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t. I live on Flamingo Key.”

“Did you ever live in an apartment over this store?”

“Not for the past six months.”

“Did you live here a year ago?”

“I did.”

“That’s when the divorce action started, in October last year.”

“And you say I was named by Mrs. Owen as—”

“She said Mr. Owen had deserted her and was living here with you.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s what she told us.”

“Then why wasn’t I...? I mean, if there was a trial or a hearing or whatever you call it, then why wasn’t I called as a witness or whatever?”

“We reached a settlement before it ever got to court. There was no need to—”

“Well, anyway, this is absurd. Who is this woman? How could she say such things about me? Living with a black man? The only black man I know is my gardener!”

“I take it you’re single, Miss Reynolds? Were you—”

“Yes, I’ve been divorced for the past six years.”

“Then you were single last year, when Mrs. Owen alleged—”

“That doesn’t mean I knew her husband! I never even heard of him till you mentioned his name.”

“Then he wasn’t living here with you?”

“Of course not! Besides, what’s any of this got to do with me—”

She cut herself short.

The abruptness with which she’d interrupted her own question, the way she’d left the sentence dangling with only the word “me” at the end of it, was somehow jarring to the ear. Had she been about to add something more to the “me,” a person’s name, perhaps, making it “me and Andrew”? or “me and whoever”? And then it occurred to me that perhaps the “me” wasn’t a word at all, perhaps the “me” was only part of a word, part of a name, in fact — part of the name “Michelle.”

“What were you about to say?”

“I said what I had to say.”

“No, you stopped yourself.”

“You told me you were representing...”

“Yes?”

“Someone named George Harper.”

“Yes.”

“So what’s any of this got to do with... with... with whatever it is that happened?”

“What happened is that his wife was murdered.”

“Yes, so what has that got to do with these questions about... what... whatever his name is?”

“Andrew Owen. Miss Reynolds, what were you about to say?”

“I told you, I said what—”

“I think you were about to say the name ‘Michelle.’ ”

“I don’t know anyone named Michelle.”

“But that’s what you were about to say, isn’t it? You were about to say, ‘What’s any of this got to do with Michelle?’”

“Well, really, I can’t imagine how you can possibly know what I was about to say. Are you a mind reader, Mr. Hope?”

“Did you know Michelle Harper?”

“No.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Positive.”

“Do you know George Harper?”

“No.”

“Let’s get back to Andrew Owen for a minute.”

“No, let’s not get back to anyone. Let’s find the door and get out of here, okay, Mr. Hope?”

“Miss Reynolds—”

“Before I call the police,” she said.

“Sure,” I said, and left.

I had the sudden feeling that everyone in the entire world — including my own client — was lying.

And I wondered why.