Dead Aim

CHAPTER 12

Marcia sat across the table from Michael Parish, drinking the bubbly water. She wanted a real drink-a strong one-but when Parish had ordered water, she’d had no choice. He had not ordered for her, and she could not remember his ever having said anything about alcohol. But she knew that what would get her through this was to do exactly as he did. Her gift for sensing what men expected and yielding to it was quicker, more reliable than her ability to figure out what was really required by the circumstances. She had to put faith in her alertness and in the subtle mimicry she had practiced all her life. They could be counted on because they were a weakness, and took no effort.

Sitting with him was disconcerting. His face was turned toward her, but his eyes kept focusing on a point beyond her left shoulder, as though he were a sly enemy watching someone sneak up behind her and trying to keep her from noticing. His conversation made the feeling stronger, because he was only prodding her into talking, to keep her calm and distracted, while he kept refocusing his eyes on Mary O’Connor, who was sitting alone in a booth thirty feet away.

“Did you come to this restaurant when you worked in Washington?”

“No,” she answered. “It’s a nice place, but most of its business comes because it’s in the hotel. I think I was here maybe twice, just to meet out-of-town clients who were staying here and get them to pretend to read something and then sign it.”

“Pretend to read it?”

She nodded, then realized that he was looking past her again, so she said, “Yes. Nobody can eat a meal and really read a legal document while a lawyer is sitting across the table providing helpful offers to explain anything that’s not clear. If a lawyer really wanted him to understand it, the document would have been sent to him in advance. So they just pretend to read all of it, trying to buy the lawyer’s respect by seeming to read rapidly and understand instantly. But they’re distracted by the food, which is tantalizing, and it’s also threatening because they want to eat it and are afraid it will get cold or the waiter will take it away, but they can’t. They have to listen to what the lawyer is saying so they won’t offend her or make her think they’re stupid. And they’re concerned about how they look.”

“How they look?”

“Sure. Vanity. They’re afraid to spill something on themselves. And do they look important to the strangers around them, reading contracts at lunch, or do they just look crude and commercial?”

“And how they look to the lawyer?”

“Of course,” she agreed.

“When we talked before, you always seemed to resent that you were treated differently from the men,” said Parish. “But it seems to me that what you’re describing is you using your sexual attractiveness to confuse the other party in an agreement.”

Her face flattened. She felt a wave of hot irritation at the nape of her neck. “My using it is different. It’s mine to use. Mine,” she repeated. “Not theirs.”

“When a firm hires a lawyer, aren’t they hiring the whole person?”

He was looking closely at her now. She wished he would look at O’Connor again. “That depends,” she said firmly.

“Education? Grammar and diction?”

“Yes,” she said. “Those things.”

“Manners?”

“Sure, but-”

“Voice?”

She gave him a glare. “Within certain limits. If you had an irritating way of speaking that wasn’t the product of a handicap or something, it probably would be legal not to hire you.”

“And if you have a soft, musical voice that men find pleasant, it would be legal to consider that an asset, wouldn’t it? Surely when you went in front of a judge and jury you used that voice.”

“This isn’t about me.”

“Of course it is,” Parish insisted. “What about your eyes and your hair? Your complexion?” He smiled. “Your figure?” He seemed to know she was about to interrupt, so he dropped the smile and spoke more quickly and seriously. “Suppose your company did a study to find out a jury’s reactions to a group of lawyers. I’ve heard there are companies that do that kind of research.”

“There are,” she said tersely.

“Well, suppose they did one and found that a jury’s reaction to an attractive woman was more positive than their reaction to an ugly one. Wouldn’t the company be foolish not to hire her and use her in difficult cases?”

“Why are you trying to make me angry? Do you think I’ll fall apart if I’m not?”

“No,” said Parish. “I’m just curious to know what you’re thinking. It’s important to me that I understand you.”

Marcia’s heart gave an odd little flutter at that, and she cursed herself for it.

But he went on. “You are extremely attractive.”

She rolled her eyes and let a breath out through her teeth. “Please.”

“I’m not trying to insult you,” he said. “It’s an advantage-an enormous one-and you’ve shown me that you’re aware of it, at least in certain circumstances. If you can confuse a person at lunch, you can get a client to hire you. You can charm a jury, make a judge want to help you. It would seem to me that it’s a gift, like being born intelligent or healthy or strong. In fact, beauty-sexual attractiveness-is made of those qualities.”

“What’s your point?”

“You have these advantages, but you complain. It would seem more sensible for someone to complain who had been deprived of them.”

Marcia’s eyes narrowed. “If I succeeded, people would think I batted my eyes at a judge. If I was promoted, people would think I slept my way to the next level, or just that my boss hoped I would be grateful for the favor. No matter what I did or didn’t do, I could never get credit for earning it with my work. Is that fair?”

“That’s a false question,” Parish said. “It’s probably possible to figure out which lawyer won a case, even if her side consisted of a team of three or four. But it’s not possible, even for her, to determine exactly how she won: what proportion of her victory was caused by the cold logic of her presentation, what proportion by how appealing she looked while she was giving it. In every instance, it was both.” He paused. “The only place where fairness comes in is whether she-a person-gets rewarded for using what she had to win.”

“But part of the reward should be the respect. You shouldn’t win and then have people feel contempt for you.”

“People don’t feel contempt in that situation. The only negative feeling is jealousy,” he assured her. “The women feel you don’t deserve to have what you’ve been given. The men see that you have powerful magic that’s not available to them.”

“I earned what I have.”

He looked at her, his expression intrigued, but said nothing to contradict her. His eyes refocused, and she knew he was studying Mary O’Connor again. At first Marcia was relieved. But after a time, she realized her irritation would not let her leave the subject. She needed to deliver a rebuttal.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you why it was unfair. I was interviewed by the senior partners, and they asked difficult questions. I was hired, and was given no special privileges that I know of. I worked for three years, as hard as anyone. By then I thought I had become an important part of the team, a member of a group that valued me because I knew some things that the others didn’t, had experience that was different from theirs, was willing to devote as much effort as anyone did to succeed on a case. It was a shock to learn otherwise. It was a sudden dose of reality that I’d never had before. And do you know what? When the time came, my reaction wasn’t ‘They have it wrong.’ It was ‘Of course.’ It had never happened before, but it felt familiar, as though it had happened a hundred times. I’m bitter, but what I’m bitter about isn’t the world we live in. It’s the loss of the brighter, better, fairer world I imagined and lived in before.”

“What did you learn about the real world?”

“It’s a hard, harsh place.”

“Why?”

“You have to study as hard as I did and work the same hours, but you also have to work to be attractive. And you can’t decline to use it: all you can be is pretty or ugly, not somebody who refuses to be either. And you have to be very calculating about everything you do, including sex. You have to make self-serving decisions about who you will sleep with, but also who you won’t sleep with. And you have to be very careful never to let them know that ‘no’ is permanent, that you won’t ever sleep with them, because then they’ll stop pleasing you and begin to punish you. And…” She let her voice trail off.

When she stopped talking, Parish looked at her sharply. She began again. “I wasn’t prepared. On an impulse, I had an affair with a partner. David. He was cruel to me. I broke it off. He made it clear that I didn’t have that option. I was afraid, but more afraid of giving in to him than of being fired. So he had me fired. When I told them I’d fight, they produced a file full of fake negative performance evaluations. In the meeting, in front of all the senior partners, one of them said, ‘You’re a disruptive influence. Who you fuck or won’t fuck is taking up billable hours. You’re not good enough as a litigator to make up the lost money. Nobody is.’ ”

Parish was looking past her again. “It’s time.” He stood up and she glanced over her shoulder to see Mary O’Connor put a cell phone into her purse and walk out of the restaurant into the hotel lobby. Marcia turned toward Parish, but he was heading for the door that led through the garden to the street.

She followed. He had done it. He had gotten her to talk through all of the waiting, and had gotten her to talk about her injustice, to make her pick at the sore until she felt the hatred like a stab. She saw Parish come close to Mary on the street, and saw her tell him something. He waved his hand at a cab, and when it stopped, Mary got into it. Parish walked back to join Marcia. “The place is a bar in Georgetown. It’s called Handel’s. Have you been there?”

She shook her head. “Uh-uh. Never heard of it.”

“Good.” He took her arm and looked at his watch, then conducted her toward the Metro stop. “We’ll take the subway.”

In the Bethesda station, Marcia watched Parish step up to one of the big automatic ticket machines along the wall at the bottom of the long escalator, push the plus and minus buttons until he got the right fare, then slip a bill into the machine, take the tickets, and scoop up his change. She had thought she would be the one to do that, because she was the one who had lived in Washington. But Parish seemed to have been everywhere and to know how all systems worked. He repeated the process. Four tickets? Return, of course. She would not have bothered.

They took up places near the tracks and watched the lights that were set into the pavement blink on and off to signal that a train was coming. The train slid into place at their feet and they stepped through the doorway and sat together in one of the orange plastic benches near the front of the car, but they did not speak. She realized that she missed being one of the people who came down into a station and stepped onto one of these trains that used to take her to work.

Everybody in the Washington subway seemed to wear a plastic pass on a long lanyard around his neck. It was a status symbol that had started with government workers and spread. Like all status symbols, it had a reverse effect. Marcia had always worn a smooth, tailored suit and kept it fresh by never sitting down on the train. An attorney for Spailer, Creeden and West didn’t have anything as common as a security pass around her neck, any more than a cabinet officer did. She could feel a tight, angry knot in her stomach.

She looked at Parish, who was staring straight ahead, his expression vacant and his body at perfect rest. It was his fault that she felt the bitterness so strongly tonight. He had reminded her, and now each step was one more familiar sensation that she had not felt in over a year, and had missed.

The vibration of the Metro train that she felt under her feet reminded her that she would never ride it again, not all dressed up on her way to that beautiful office in Georgetown. Even the hotel restaurant near the Bethesda station had set off feelings of loss. She wondered if Parish had known before he had asked.

The ride took only twenty minutes, and as the train pulled in briefly at each of the familiar stops, she felt the intensity of her anger growing. Her life had been destroyed. She was willing to concede that what she was most angry about was that a whole system of false beliefs had been wrecked, shown to be untenable. But anyone could have seen that she had needed those illusions. She was also aware that billions of people in the past had lived and died without ever being disabused of similar beliefs. Why could hers not have been preserved?

When she had been at school, she and some friends had spent hours discussing what the unforgivable sin was, the one that could never be erased by absolution. The majority had said it was witchcraft. Marcia had thought it was destroying another person’s faith. What had set that off? Oh, yes. A Hawthorne story they had read in class. Things were so much more complicated in girls’ schools than mere philosophical inquiry. The witchcraft answer had gained adherents because one girl had been having a feud with two others, and burning candles in her room with ominous incantations. The faith answer was not free from outside influences either. Tanya Holbrooke had recently scandalized a few classmates by referring to born-again Christians as “fooled again,” and they spent most of the time during the discussion giving her sidelong glances.

That had not been what Marcia had meant when she had chosen that position. She had meant someone like Hitler, who had done something so evil that a person who had seen it happen would find the world intolerable and the idea of a loving God laughable.

The train began to slow as it approached Farragut North, and she stood up. Parish remained seated until it stopped, then joined her. The door slid open and they walked to the escalator and came up on I Street.

The night was warm, but it was beginning to rain now, a soft, persistent rain that had already made the streets shine with reflected headlights and taillights, and made Marcia stay close to buildings to take advantage of awnings and overhangs.

This part of I Street had a few old, quiet, pretty hotels and restaurants, a lot of businesses that sold clean, small things like watches and invisible things like travel and investments. A couple of blocks south, the diagonal of Pennsylvania Avenue marked the busy, faster-paced zone where a small, quiet bar was an impossibility. She had never been to the bar that Emily Lyons had tracked him to, although she had walked that part of Washington completely a number of times when she had lived here. A person didn’t have to be away for long before things began to change, and there were few places left for memory to hang on to.

She saw the corner coming up, and confirmed her impression. This was a bar that had not existed when she had worked for the firm. But there was a new, nagging sadness. She could not remember what had been on this spot before. She could not bring back any image of what had been, only look at the windows and the doorway of the place, and see a business that could as easily have been on an intersection in Cincinnati or Philadelphia.

She slowed and began to watch Parish. He had put an earpiece into his right ear, and he was listening as he walked. It occurred to her that he looked like a Secret Service agent, with the thin wire the color of a doll’s skin leading to the single earphone, and the raincoat that might cover a gun. Tonight it covered two of them: his, and hers.

He said, “Emily says that he’s in a booth with a young woman. We’ll have to wait.”

She let a frown show, then worried that he might have seen it.

“Does that bother you?” he asked. His curiosity seemed intrusive, voyeuristic.

“The woman?” she asked. “Believe me, it’s not jealousy. I’m just frustrated that I can’t get it over with. She’s an inconvenience.”

“Emily says it won’t be long.”

“What won’t?”

“They finished dinner a while ago, and they’re drinking. She’ll go to the ladies’ room, or he’ll go to the men’s.”

“What will happen then?”

But he had his hand over his free ear, and he was listening to the earpiece, nodding and smiling. He turned to her. “They’re ready. Are you?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

They moved around the building to the rear, and stopped at the edge of a paved alley that held a dumpster. She could see a back door that opened onto a short corridor with a telephone and rest rooms. Parish opened his raincoat, reached to the inner pocket, and handed her the gun. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol like the ones she had practiced with on the ranch. She could feel Parish watching her closely, so she performed all of the necessary motions deliberately and efficiently. She checked the safety to be sure it was engaged, released the magazine and withdrew it to verify that it held a full load, then pushed it back up into the butt until it clicked in. She pulled the slide back to cycle the first round into the chamber, then flipped off the safety again. Her eye passed across his, and caught there. “I have good reasons,” she said.

He smiled broadly, amused. “The only reason you need is that you want to.”

He held his hand to his ear again. “All right. The woman has gotten up and is walking toward the ladies’ room. She’s inside. Mary is moving in to keep her there. Now Emily is going to his table. She says the woman asked her to tell him she needs him outside. It sounds as though he’s coming. Yes. Get ready. The first one out that door will be Emily. Did you hear me?”

“Yes. I heard you.” She held the gun behind her back as he’d taught her, not in a pocket where it could catch on the lining or come out too slowly. The door opened and out came Emily, stepping into the circle of light from the overhead flood over the door. Emily did not look in their direction but took a wide, leisurely turn out of the door and held it open.

The man who came out after her was David. He glanced around under the light for his new girlfriend. He looked good. He seemed to have lost five or ten pounds, and his hair was a little gray at the temples now. It went well with the dark gray suit.

“David,” she said. “Here.”

He turned his head, saw her female shape in the shadows, took a step toward her, then stopped. He seemed to know the voice. He half-turned, but Emily was leaning against the closed door.

Marcia brought the gun around her body at shoulder height. David pushed Emily aside so he could tug on the door, but she had engaged the lock when she had closed it. He whirled toward Marcia, and she fired. The gun kicked upward a few inches, but she brought it down and fired once, twice more at his chest. Her aim had not been perfect, and he was sitting on the ground now. She could see a hole in the suit up near his left shoulder-not his heart-and another in the middle of his belly. He had both his hands clasped over that one, and his mouth was clenched in a bare-toothed grimace. She knew now why they had made her kill the deer. The size and the look of dazed agony were about the same.

Parish said, “Marcia, we’re just about out of time.”

Marcia stood over David, staring at his eyes. She wanted to say something to him that would make him hurt more than the bullets and teach him that he deserved this.

She heard footsteps behind her. Parish appeared on the left side of her peripheral vision, pulled his gun out, held it near David’s temple, and fired it through his head. The body toppled sideways onto the pavement as though pushed by a wind.

Then Parish had her by the arm, and Emily Lyons was striding off along I Street to the west. Parish’s legs were much longer than Marcia’s and they were stepping along at a pace that forced her to trot to keep up, but she knew that his coat shielded her so that together they would look like any other couple going home in the rain.

Then they were down under the street in the Metro station again, boarding a train. “Doors closing,” said the soothing recorded female voice, and they were away. They sat together. She looked up at Parish’s face for the first time, but he seemed unaware that she was looking. She turned to stare out the window into the darkness of the tunnel.

He had even done the last thing better. She had seen it on David’s face. She had already shot him two or three times, and he had been in pain. But she had watched his expression change as soon as he had seen Parish step out of the shadows with a gun. It was then that she had understood.

She had been staring stupidly down at David, trying to think of words. Words! But then she had seen David’s eyes. He knew what Parish was about to do, and it meant everything to him. She could tell that somewhere, deep in his mind, hidden from her, had been the thought that this would be over: an ambulance would come and take him to a hospital, and the surgeons would save him. He would somehow live on. All the time while he had been watching Marcia standing there over him, trying to choose between ways of saying “I hate you” and ways of saying “You deserve this,” he had been thinking, She’ll go away soon, because she has to, and I’ll get through this. I’ll live. But when he had seen Parish with the pistol, stepping up to him, he had felt much more than the pain she had caused. David’s eyes had said that he now knew that this moment was absolutely his last. There would be no ambulance, no surgeons. He was going to have a bullet through his brain.

She even understood the deer better. The reason they were dangerous when they were wounded was not that they were trying to fight. They were trying to get up and run. They still had hope. Parish had taken David’s hope.

Suddenly, Marcia was terribly tired. She felt as though she were weightless, but she could barely lift her arm.

“Well?” said Parish.

She cocked her head and looked up at him.

He asked, “Was it what you expected?”

“No.”

“Not disappointed, are you?”

She looked down at her hands. To her surprise, they were not clenched in fists, or shaking. They were merely her hands, at rest on her lap, the fingers a bit too plump for her taste, the nails too short to be very pretty. “No,” she said. “It was exactly what I might have wished for. I just couldn’t decide how it should end. But you knew. You ended it perfectly.”