Falls The Shadow

60

Beth was waiting for me at the bar of Chaucer’s, a bottle of Bud in front of her.

I had called her from the seat of the La-Z-Boy and asked her to meet me here, and now I slipped in beside her and ordered another beer for her and a Sea Breeze for me.

When the bartender spotted me, he gave me a look. “No trouble tonight, right?”

“No trouble,” I said.

“It was bad enough cleaning up the blood from the last time you were here. Who was that creep anyway?”

“My dentist.”

“Really? Is he any good? Because I’ve been having this trouble with my…”

As the bartender described his dental issues, pulling down his lower lip to show a jumble of stained Chiclets, Beth stared at me as if I had grown a second head.

“Have you ever noticed the teeth in this city?” I said after the bartender, mercifully, had cut off his demonstration and left to get our drinks. “It’s like we’re living in England.”

“How was your trip?” she said.

“Instructive.”

“Anything I should know?”

“Just that our client didn’t do it.”

“I already knew that,” she said, and then she realized what I might have said. “You found proof in Chicago?”

“I found a strange coincidence that might be seen as proof,” I said, “if I can figure out one more thing.”

“What?”

“Why would my dentist murder Leesa Dubé?”

I told her about my trip to the Peppers’, about what I had discovered, about the coincidence of the photograph clutched in the dead woman’s hand. Beth gave me a hug when I was finished, like I had discovered a cure for cancer.

In the midst of her celebrations, the bartender brought our drinks. I lifted my glass. “Cheers,” I said.

We clinked, we drank, I drank fast. I felt suddenly better and gestured for another. Anything to get the sight of that video screen out of my head.

Beth suddenly grew pensive. “Is the coincidence enough?” she said.

“No, but it’s a start. We still have to figure out the why. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whitney Robinson dropped in to see me the other day and he said something that troubled me.”

“I know Whit’s your friend, Victor, but I don’t trust him. He’s a little too tweedy, don’t you think?”

“Never trust a man in tweeds, is that it?”

“Yes, actually. A hard-and-fast rule that has held me in good stead over the years. And bow ties trouble me, too.”

“What about George Will?”

“Proves the point on both counts. But there’s something else about Whit, at least as it relates to François. He seems – how do I put this? – a little too interested.”

She might have been right, but just then I didn’t care. “During Whit’s visit,” I barreled on, “he told me something intriguing about François that I thought I ought to pass along.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

“He said that François, for all his charming surface, is hollow inside.”

“He doesn’t know him.”

“Maybe not. But he said there existed some physical evidence to prove his point. Our client lied about his stuff. It wasn’t all gone. It was in a storage locker. And this afternoon I found it.”

“Oh, I bet you did.”

“Beth, you need to listen-”

“No, I don’t, Victor. I don’t need to listen to anything that Whitney Robinson has to say about François. Or you either, for that matter. You said you wouldn’t give me a lecture.”

“Maybe I care for you too much to stay quiet.”

“Well, try, Victor. Tell me, how’s your friend Carol?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

“I love the enthusiasm in your voice whenever you mention her name.”

“She’s beautiful, well dressed, well mannered, and she doesn’t have cats. In short, she’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”

“But still, something’s not right.”

“We’re not talking about my love life now.”

“Maybe we should. You think you have the right to lecture me, you with your never-ending line of women, whom you complain about even as you sleep with them, women like your Carol. I might be confused, but at least I feel something. You should try it sometime.”

“And what is it exactly that you’re feeling?”

She took a swig of her beer, thought about it a bit. “Do you know that fizzy sensation you get when you first fall in love, like your brain is floating in champagne?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not like that. It’s not romantic. It’s something different, deeper in a way. It’s as if the reason I went to law school was to someday help François.”

“Beth.”

“As if everything in my life has been leading me to him. I don’t understand it, and I’m not going to act on it now, because I’m a lawyer and he’s our client and he needs us in a different way, but I’m not going to stop feeling it. And, Victor, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“You sure about that?” I reached down into my briefcase, pulled out one of the videocassettes with French scrawled across the stained label, slid it across the bar until it was in front of her.

She looked down at it for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“You know what I discovered today? I discovered that you can learn a lot about a man from the pornography he creates. And I’m talking about more than the size of his cock. I’m talking about the cruelty, the pent-up violence, the way the world exists solely to satisfy his depraved needs.”

“Go to hell.”

“You ought to take a gander. This one has quite the cast.”

“People change. He’s not the same person he was before. He’s been in prison now for three years. He hasn’t seen his daughter in three years. That does something to a man. It has to.”

“One viewing.”

She shoved it back at me. “Put it away, Victor. Burn it if you want. I don’t need it.”

“Later you might,” I said.

“Remember years ago, right after your cross-examination of Councilman Moore in the Concannon case, when you told me it was never going to happen between us?”

“I remember.”

“That was your choice.”

“I know.”

“So from now on, butt out.”

“This has worked out quite nicely, don’t you think?” I said. “A pleasant drink with a friend.”

She drained her beer, slapped the bottle on the bar, dropped off her stool. “You’ll cover these,” she said, waving her finger at the empty bottles.

I raised my glass in assent.

“Thanks,” she said. “Don’t worry about me, Victor. Worry about figuring out why your dentist killed Leesa Dubé so we can get François out of jail.”

“That’s what I’m not getting paid anymore to do.”

She stood beside me for a moment and then reached over and tapped the tape. “This doesn’t change anything for you, does it? You’re not going to suddenly take a dive at the trial to protect me, are you?”

I took a long swallow. It was tempting, letting François rot, yes it was. But I had few enough lodestars to cling to in my life, and my obligation to my clients was about the only one I could trust utterly.

“No,” I said. “Once you have me on your side I’m like a leech. I might suck out all the blood I can, sure, but I’m hell to get rid of.”

“Good,” she said. “You may be an asshole, Victor, but you’re a hell of a lawyer.”

Then she leaned down and kissed me on my head before leaving the bar. I didn’t turn to watch her go. Instead I snatched down the rest of my drink and ordered another.

I was just bringing the newly filled glass to my lips when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I swiveled around. Beth was standing there, her head tilted to the side.

“Just out of curiosity…”

I laughed, she joined in, and for a moment it almost felt all right between us.

When she left for good, I tried to think it through again. I was failing to make some obvious step. That night with Bob in this very bar seemed to hold an answer for me. What had he said after all the violence and the blood? Whom did you help today? Yes, right, as if I were the hapless, selfish failure, all of which I admit to, and he was the saint. And then something else. Accidents happen, Victor, remember that. Sometimes even the best of intentions go awry. That’s right. And he said something similar earlier, when I was in the chair. Most murders are accidents of blind happenstance, had said Dr. Bob. Another absurd event in an absurd world. But even Camus knew that the absurdity of the universe could only explain so much. Even if the murder itself was an accident, why was Dr. Bob in Leesa Dubé’s apartment on the night of the murder? What was their connection, other than doctor-patient? What was going on? Why?

In frustration I tapped the black plastic of the videotape with my fingertips. Then I stopped the tapping and looked at the vile thing in front of me. I lifted it up and examined it closely. The black plastic, the French scrawled on the white label, the stains that spotted the paper. The spots. The stains.

And suddenly, strangely, the thing grew hot in my hands.