The Last Alibi

8

Shauna

Friday, June 7

Jason and his private investigator, Joel Lightner, are sitting in my office. Lightner has his tie off and his collar open; his week is over. Jason is sitting on the couch in the back of my office, his left leg propped up.

“Come out with us,” Joel says. “We’ll have a few drinks, and who knows? You might finally decide to sleep with me.” Joel is twice divorced, now a committed bachelor and skirt-chaser. If he has sex half as often as he talks about it, his penis should be in the hall of fame.

“It’ll be fun,” Jason adds.

“Having drinks with you? Or sleeping with Joel?” I ask.

Jason likes that. He’s in a chipper mood, he is, a rosy glow to his cheeks. It’s getting harder and harder to predict his moods. A few nights back at dinner, he looked like he was going to toss his cookies, but then he perked up. This morning, walking in the door, he barely lifted his eyes off his feet, and now he’s wearing a stupid smirk. And I can’t get over the hair, curling out around his ears, bangs hanging across his face. Since college, it was always the high and tight. Who is this person calling himself Jason?

“Come out with us, Shauna,” Joel says again. “You haven’t for a long time.”

That’s true; it was the trial. I sacrifice my otherwise diverse and stimulating social life whenever I get close to a trial date. That diverse and stimulating social life consists of dinner at a steak joint with Jason and Joel, who get drunk and insult each other, then heading to a bar where Jason and Joel get drunker and insult each other more and sometimes flirt with women.

I have become one of those women who hang out with men. I didn’t used to be. I had a pack of girlfriends, mostly from law school but some from college, whom I ran around with for years. What changed? Marriage. Kids. For them, not me. Nights out at the bars or poetry slams or concerts became quick happy hours before they had to get home, and even the full-scale nights out weren’t what they used to be, my friends yawning at eight-thirty, children-tired, or meeting up with their husbands later that night. And then I just got tired of the whole thing, these evenings out with women who were married with kids, who either talk about their kids endlessly (day care / soccer / Music Garden / Chinese lessons / Dora the Explorer) or, worse yet-much worse yet-catch themselves doing that and then realize it has the effect of leaving you out, and then they awkwardly stop, the needle screeching off the album mid-chorus, and there is an unstated (God, I hope it’s unstated) pact not to make Shauna feel worse than she probably already does, and someone forces out a painful segue-“So, Shauna, are you working on any interesting cases?”-and then you have two choices: (1) acknowledge it and say, “It’s okay, it doesn’t make me feel barren and unfulfilled and desperately lonely to hear you talk about your kids and husbands, now what was that you were saying about arts-and-crafts camp?” or (2) let them pity you and tell them about the interesting cases you’re working on.

And then you get the sense that it would be easier if you weren’t there, and then you realize that they’ve had the same thought, that they sometimes get together without you, some vague reference to lunch at Alexander’s, and they glance at you and say, with a trace of apology, forced casualness, “It was just a last-minute thing after lacrosse practice.” And so you decide it would be easier to hang out with women just like you, also single, also childless, but then you realize they aren’t your best friends, but-but-maybe they can become your best friends, but then you realize that you’re thirty-five and you don’t feel like inventing new best buds at that age, and you find yourself probing them, examining them, wondering, what is it about them, why can’t they find someone, thinking that maybe you can find something in them, some flaw that you have, too, and that if you can just discover that one thing, just that one thing, then suddenly eligible, successful, decent, and handsome men with large penises, who absolutely adore musicals and pinot noir and cunnilingus, will come crawling out of the woodwork competing for your hand in marriage.

And then it turns out it’s easier to hang out with Jason and Joel while they get drunk and insult each other.

“The reason she won’t come out with us has nothing to do with her dislike for you,” Jason tells Joel. “She has a trial coming up. How far away?”

“Less than a month,” I say, feeling a shot of dread. “And you’re going to start on it next week, right?” Trials are a bitch. They can be fun, but the workup sucks. Jason has a lot more trial experience than I do, and he’s a different personality. He reads a file the day before and goes in there and, damn him, kicks the crap out of witnesses. I don’t even enter the courthouse unless I’ve dissected every single angle of every single question.

My client, Arangold Construction, got into a construction job with the city’s civic auditorium that didn’t end up so well. The project was delayed, there were problems at the site, ultimately the city replaced Arangold, and the new contractor ran up the bill under the guise of time restraints. So now the city is suing Arangold for twenty million dollars. It’s a bet-the-company case. Arangold loses this case and gets hit with a verdict anywhere near the number the city wants, the company goes under. Twenty-two employees lose their jobs.

“Yeah, sure. And I can stay tonight if you need some help,” Jason says. “It’s not a problem.”

I look over the overwhelming stacks of paper on the floor in the corner. “Start fresh on Monday,” I say. “I can divide out a chunk of the case, a discrete part, and hand it off to you.”

“Sure.”

Marie, our receptionist, pokes her head in the door.

“There she is!” says Joel. He’d sleep with her, too. He’d sleep with a hermit crab.

She points to Jason. “Court reporter here to see you,” she says. “Her name’s Alexa?”