Fourteen

What’s he going to be like without Linda?

Fager heard his secretary outside his door talking to the only other employee of Walter Fager and Associates, P.C. His associate lawyer, Kate Morrow, and Roberta Weldon thinking he didn’t hear everything that went on in his law office.

Weldon: Linda made him human.

Morrow: A work in progress, never to be completed.

Weldon: Now I have to go in and give him a message about Linda’s body. And something else he’s going to hate.

Morrow: Tell him to go home. He doesn’t need to sign motions for postponement. We know his scrawl.

Weldon: I don’t think he’s eaten in two days. Since Linda, he’s living on coffee and hatred.

Morrow: What else is new?

Since Linda.

Since Linda, he’d been glued to a computer screen, using up printer cartridges. He finished the one in the printer in his home office as light through the curtains told him it was morning. Dumped everything in an empty box for printer paper, e-mailed research to himself, and came down to his law office, the first one there in the morning, hours before anyone else, turning on lights to make coffee, not bothering to turn up the heat before he got back to work and closed his door on the rest of building, still dark and cold.

He heard a knock, then the creak of hinges, a footstep on the old plank floor.

“OMI called,” Roberta Weldon said to his back. “They’re ready to release Linda for burial.”

“Call that Italian place, Berar-something.”

“Berardinelli.”

“I want a cremation. As soon as they can. A small service in their chapel. Nothing elaborate. We can play some of her music.”

He focused on his computer screen. He was reading an interview in San Francisco Arts Monthly, Geronimo on how his use of found objects reflects the story of the American Indian. How the way he obtained supplies isn’t scavenging, but a twenty-first-century version of hunting-gathering. Some of his work used what others discarded or overlooked. Or he accepted what nature had to offer, from polished stones in a stream bed to dried cactus—so many textures and forms that he could never exhaust the resource. His more serious work engaged the hunting side of traditional Native cultures, harvesting what he needed to add vital spirit and individual voice, the way a shaman would hunt eagles for feathers. But it was too hard to get eagle feathers these days. You had to be a tribe working within limits set by the federal government. To infuse his work with similar power he had to be creative, resourceful, “tapping into the ancient knowledge that helped my people survive in the harsh Southwest desert. I express their struggle and spirituality in art that speaks to us in this modern world, in a contemporary idiom.”

“There’s something else,” Roberta said.

Fager had forgotten she was in the room.

“What else?” Impatience in his voice. He needed to read this. He turned to face her, get it over with.

She held an obsolete appointment book from a time when the office ran on paper.

“Cody Geronimo called here.”

He came out of his chair, his legs stiff from sitting so long.

“When?”

“February 4, 2004. He called for an appointment. I sent him through to Marcy. She handled intake then.”

“This office has never represented Cody Geronimo. That date again?”

She repeated the date of Geronimo’s call, her face telling him it meant something more.

“Marcy left the firm that month,” he said, understanding the expression on her face. “Went out on her own. And she’s never looked back.”

Through his window he could see the mansion Thornton used as her law office. The high-gloss hood of her red Aston-Martin threw sunlight into his eyes.

Marcy Thornton hurled the New Mexico Criminal Code against
the wall.

“The autopsy’s completed? I wanted this slow-walked, forgotten. I wanted Linda Fager to be that hamburger in the bottom of a freezer nobody remembers.”

“I thought you liked her,” Lily Montclaire said. “Weren’t you friends?”

“I have a client. What else do you need to know?”

Montclaire picked up the heavy legal tome and replaced it on Thornton’s desk.

“It was Aragon and her partner. They got someone in OMI to move Linda Fager to the top of the list.”

Thornton fell back in the oversized chair behind her mahogany desk. Montclaire kicked off her pumps and stretched out on the leather sofa.

“When’s Cody returning from New York?” Montclaire asked as her eyes fell on a sock under the coffee table. The boy she had picked up at the mall for Thornton’s office party had been given a wad of cash and hustled out when Geronimo called in a panic. Blue eyes, narrow hips, smooth, almost hairless legs. She wondered if he shaved or was just that young. She could see the starburst tattoo around his navel but his name escaped her.

“He’s with some filthy rich collector,” Thornton said. “Said he’d be gone a couple days.”

“Can we reach him by fax? I want to send him that drawing of the bar.”

“Why didn’t you photograph it, send it to his phone? A fax? You’re wasting time.”

Montclaire wanted to tell Thornton a photo wouldn’t have done the job, you couldn’t get the whole bar in one shot, all the tables, the doors. She had done it right her way. But she said, “Give me his e-mail. I’ll scan it and send an attachment.”

Thornton exhaled. “And Fager’s in motion. Cody said he was at his gallery for the opening of his new show.”

Montclaire wasn’t interested in Fager or Cody’s new works. At that moment, her mind drifted across town, back to the two men she had taken to a room at the Eldorado to make up for the interrupted party with the hairless boy from the mall. Instead of a slow night for them watching a game in a bar, a woman who had once been in Cosmo had taken them to a fancy hotel. The Cosmo job had been a photo to go with a short article about getting ready for summer. She was riding a classic fat tire bike along a beach, flowers and shells in the basket on the handle bars, a sheer beach robe over a bikini. Barefoot, toenails painted ten different colors. It had been hard as hell to pedal in the sand.

“Fager was there with a big slob pretending to be a dude from Malibu,” Thornton was saying, pulling Montclaire out of her thoughts. “Wanted paintings to hang over his couch. Leather vest, about three hundred pounds, biker’s boots. Uncomfortable in a starched shirt. Something-ski, Cody said. Something Polish. We know who that is.”

Montclaire sat up, interested, her mind back on the job.

Thornton said, “Get Cody to identify the table at the bar where he was sitting before Bronkowski finds it. Or Aragon.” She reached for the criminal code. “After I finish this brief, I’ll work on getting Walter off our tail. You watch, he’s going to pull some patented Fager street-fighting move. But we’re killer drones, high in the sky where he can’t see us, where he won’t even look, waiting for a clear shot to put him down.”

“Sometimes I worry about you.”

“You love it. Speaking of which, you free tonight?”

“Depends.” She was thinking of trolling the mall to find the boy with the starburst tattoo, kicking herself for not getting his number, not writing down his name.

“Judge Diaz wants me at eight.”

“Kind of late.”

Thornton let a smile spread across her face. “At her house. Bench-bar relations working group. Tonight’s agenda: whatever the Chief Judge wants.”

Montclaire bit her lip and thought it over. Judy Diaz was older than Marcy, doing something else before law school. Not the kind of woman she would lock on when other choices were available. But Diaz had a good figure under that robe.

She’d done judges, of a different sort. It was how she got her start modeling, throwing something at the men and women whose ribbons determined whether she would be wearing bras and panties in a warm studio, or outside, freezing on a winter shoot while the photographer flipped out because his cocoa was gloppy. But it was hot, while the girls were told to chew ice so you couldn’t see their breath in the air.

She let Thornton know she was interested. “Will this be one of those forbidden ex parte conferences?” she asked, a playful tone in her voice.

“Party, yes.” Thornton winked. “X, you bet. We’ll be conferring about trying something new. Our Judge Judy likes what she knows. But she’s open to creative interpretations of existing precedent.”