Atlanta, 1972
Daniella awoke with the disorienting sense that something of import had occurred last night, but she couldn’t recollect what. It was like the mornings after a fight with Pete—their fights were rare but fraught—when she woke up knowing something was off but not being able to remember exactly what until a few seconds later. (These days when she and Pete fought it was usually over whether or not to have a baby.) And now came clarity about the night before: For the first time in four years, she had seen Eve. Probably. Maybe.
She glanced at the clock on her bedside table. 7:25 a.m. In five minutes, her alarm would sound. She turned it off and rose from bed, taking care to be quiet so as not to wake Pete, who was asleep, curled up on his side, his reddish-brown hair just beginning to show flecks of gray near the temples. He was only twenty-nine, but the men in his family went gray early. Their cat, Argus, who was especially beloved by Pete, was waiting on the other side of their closed bedroom door, mewing for his daily dish of wet food. Argus kneaded their heads at night, keeping them awake, and so finally Pete had agreed to shut him out of the room when they went to bed, though he hated doing so and would often remind Daniella not to slip on Argus’s tears when she opened the door in the morning.
Belting her robe around her waist, she walked into the kitchen to feed Argus and start a pot of coffee. Pete ordered Kona beans from some roaster in New York, which was a ridiculous expense but something she agreed to because the smooth, chocolaty coffee really did taste better than the stuff you could get at the A&P. Once the coffee was brewing she opened the front door to get the paper. They took the Atlanta Constitution, which had a more liberal editorial page than the Atlanta Journal and was delivered first thing in the morning, whereas the Journal didn’t come until the afternoon. Pete thought they should subscribe to both for “balance,” but Daniella held firm in her refusal, saying two papers was a waste.
She pulled the paper out of the newspaper holder to the side of the mailbox and waved hello to Fran across the street, who was also in robe and slippers and also fetching the paper. A Quaker, Fran had recently left her husband, announcing that, after twenty years of marriage, she had finally reached the conclusion that “Norman is a real asshole.”
Who wasn’t leaving their spouse? On their short street alone four couples had split up. Four! Recently she had gotten together with some of the girls—women—who had lived in Monty House during her one year at Belmont: Lane, Eleanor, Kitty, and a woman named Beatrice whom she had never really known. Out of their group of five, three were going through a divorce—only she and Kitty had no plans to end their marriages! She had even heard that Eve’s brother, Charlie, and his wife had divorced. Apparently she had moved to San Francisco and gotten involved with est.
What would it be like to divorce Pete? What would it be like to lose a leg?
Back in the kitchen she poured herself a cup of coffee and then a bowl of cereal. Pete had cornflakes with milk every morning, often with a banana sliced on top. She had adopted a similar ritual, only she preferred raisin bran. Standing at the counter to eat, she unrolled the newspaper.
Above the fold was a photo of a burning house. The headline read: “Explosion and Fire in Poncey-Highland; Man’s Body Found; Police Suspect Bomb; Possible Link to Antiwar Radicals.”
Her mind immediately went to Eve. She had seen Eve, long-lost Eve, radical Eve, the night before. And this morning there was news of a bombing that had killed someone. Her heart was in her throat as she skimmed the article, alert for pertinent details. The explosion appeared to have been caused by a homemade bomb, the damage most severe on the main level of the house. In the burned-out basement of the building, the intact remains of a man believed to be John Travis (“J.T.”) Higgins were found. Mr. Higgins, a longtime employee of Mead Paper Company, rented the basement efficiency. Mr. Higgins’s supervisor confirmed that, while he typically worked nights, he had called in sick that evening, saying he had been to Grady Hospital, where he was diagnosed with pneumonia. The owner of the home, Patrick Daly, who lived in Decatur, described J.T. as “a real good guy, salt of the earth.” He said J.T. had been renting from him for years now, whereas “those two hippies, a fellow and a girl,” had only lived in the upstairs unit for three months. He had been there a few weeks ago, trying to fix a leak that was causing damage to J.T.’s ceiling. No one was home, but you don’t mess with water, so he had entered without their permission, noticing with disgust the posters he saw hanging on the walls: All leftist propaganda, including one showing a revolver with “Piece Now” printed below it. He thought of evicting them right then and there but knew he probably didn’t have the grounds. Plus, they had paid several months’ rent up front.
Daniella, who had been standing at the counter, felt her knees nearly buckle. She needed to sit. She made her way unsteadily to the breakfast table, sinking into one of the kitchen chairs. Breathe, she told herself. Breathe.
The “girl” described by the landlord must have been Eve. Otherwise, it was too much of a coincidence that Daniella had seen her last night. So the “fellow” was surely Warren. For, as much as Warren and Eve liked to deny that they were a couple, they had been inextricably linked since Eve and Daniella’s last year of college. And “Piece Now” sounded exactly like him.
Did Warren and Eve build the bomb together? Did it accidentally detonate, killing them both? The article said that the police suspected they would find more casualties. My God, was Eve dead?
Or maybe Eve had already built the bomb by the time Daniella saw her at Oxford Books. When did she see her? Eight p.m.? Eight thirty? Neighbors reported first hearing the explosion around 10:40 p.m. Perhaps Eve and Warren built the bomb, but then Eve made herself scarce, leaving Warren in charge of planting it—driving it over to, say, the Boeing Headquarters, because surely he hadn’t intended to blow up his own place. Maybe Eve helped build the bomb, then headed off to Buckhead, a place so close to her estranged home that no one would think to look for her there, the prodigal daughter lurking around the periphery of all that was once familiar.
In that case, Eve might still be alive. But she would also be a murderer.
Pete walked into the kitchen wearing his blue-and-white-striped pajama bottoms but no pajama top, revealing the scantest sprinkling of reddish chest hairs. He headed toward the coffeemaker but then stopped, studying Daniella, who was still hunched over the kitchen table, now rubbing her temples with her fingers.
“You okay?” he asked.
Daniella held the paper out for him to take. “I’m almost positive I saw Eve last night at Oxford Books.”
She watched as Pete scanned the article. “Shit,” he said after a few moments.
“I know. It had to be Eve, right? It had to be Eve and that idiot Warren.”
“Are the investigators absolutely certain it was a bomb? And not a gas leak?”
“I don’t think the paper would have led with the word ‘bomb’ if they weren’t pretty damn sure it was one.”
“God.” Pete furiously scratched his head, tousling his already unkempt hair, messy from sleep. He walked to the coffeemaker and poured himself a cup, then came and sat at the table with Daniella. “Eve frustrated me, endlessly, but I can’t see her building a bomb.”
“I can,” said Daniella, in a small, pained voice. “She could become so overtaken with indignation and outrage. I can see her justifying it somehow.”
“I don’t think we know enough yet to draw any conclusions.”
“I know. Should we drive over there? Linwood Avenue is, what, two miles away? Maybe we could talk to a cop, figure something out.”
“I imagine the street is completely blocked off and completely secured.”
“I keep trying to think of someone we know at the paper, someone who might know more details.”
“I could drive downtown and see if the street edition has more information. It’s got a later print time.”
“Yes! That’s brilliant. Please do.”
“I can check the West Coast sports scores while I’m at it,” Pete joked.
Daniella gave him a half smile. “Hurry back.”
• • •
While Pete was on his mission, Daniella had another cup of coffee, got dressed, and then phoned the answering service at work, leaving a message for her secretary that she would be coming in late. She hung up quickly, not wanting to tie up the phone for any longer than necessary, just in case Eve might be trying to call. Of course, that was probably wishful thinking, as it seemed a distinct possibility that Eve had died in the explosion, that her remains simply hadn’t been found or identified by the time the newspaper story went to print. And even if she was alive, would she really contact Daniella? Other than the night before—assuming the woman she saw at Oxford Books really was Eve—they hadn’t talked in more than four years.
Daniella had just started pacing the living room when Pete returned with the street edition of the paper. “They found out more,” he said grimly. She grabbed it out of his hand and sat on the sofa to read, Pete sitting beside her. Soon Argus was on his lap, purring loudly. The paper did, indeed, have additional news. It now seemed very likely that the bombing was tied to some radical faction of the antiwar movement. A pair of dog tags and more human remains had been found among the rubble. They read: Minh, Ho Chi, the name of the now-deceased president of North Vietnam. An unidentified investigator speculated that the bomb was probably intended to go off elsewhere, its detonation an accident, an eerie parallel to the 1970 11th Street townhouse bombing in New York that had killed three members of the Weathermen, two of whom were engaged in the act of building the bomb when it exploded.
Ho Chi Minh dog tags. Jesus. Warren had Ho Chi Minh dog tags. He had shown them to her during that awful dinner in New York years ago; he had twirled them in front of her as if to elicit shock. She hadn’t given him the satisfaction. She had simply murmured, “Hmmm,” and turned to Pete to ask him to pass the soy sauce.
Was Warren dead, his body ripped to pieces and mixed among the rubble?
There had been so many bombings over the last few years—including several in Atlanta in 1970, the most significant an explosion at the State Capitol that shut down the place for weeks. It seemed there were reports of bombings all of the time. But with a few infamous exceptions, they were mostly symbolic, causing property damage, not death. Last night’s bombing had killed a man living in the basement. And it had presumably killed Warren, too. And maybe Eve. Oh God, please don’t let it have killed Eve.
Did Warren (and Eve?) know that J.T. worked nights and that was why he (they?) detonated the bomb at that time? But surely, as the paper had speculated, the intention hadn’t been to blow up the house where they lived. Surely the bomb was intended to blow up something else.
She turned to Pete. “Do you think I should call the police and let them know I might have seen Eve last night?”
“Hmm. Since you can’t be sure it was her, I don’t think you’re under any legal obligation to report it.”
“I don’t necessarily mean a legal obligation, but a moral one.”
Just then the phone in the kitchen rang. Daniella jumped, causing Argus to leap from Pete’s lap and run away. She rushed to answer it, hoping against all odds that it would somehow be Eve on the line. But no, it was just Sandy, her secretary.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” she said. “But a Mrs. Katharine Monty phoned. She said her case was urgent and you would know what it was about.”
But she didn’t know what it was about, didn’t know a Katharine Monty. Daniella was a corporate lawyer. Her clients were all men. Was there a chance that Katharine Monty was actually Eve, posing as their old friend Kitty, her last name a reference to their dorm at Belmont? If so, Eve was still alive!
After ending the call, she quickly dialed the number Sandy had given her. After ten long rings, someone picked up.
“Monty residence. May I ask who is calling, please?” It was Eve’s voice, repeating the exact refrain she used to use when answering the shared phone in the hallway at Monty House.
“This is Daniella Strum. I’m trying to reach Katharine Monty.”
“Daniella! It’s me. Kitty. Listen, I can’t talk now, but is there any chance we could meet for coffee?”
It was most definitely not Kitty.
“Are you okay?” whispered Daniella, as if her sotto voce might throw off anyone who might be tapping the call.
“How about the Majestic?” answered Eve.
The Majestic was a diner on Ponce that stayed open twenty-four hours a day and smelled always of bacon.
“Meet in an hour?” asked Daniella.
“Okay.”
She hung up. My God. She was going to meet Eve. Eve who might be involved in the explosion that killed J. T. Higgins and surely killed Warren St. Clair.
She wondered if she was obligated to call the police, but she wanted to speak to Eve first, learn everything she could about what had happened. If she were Eve’s lawyer she would have attorney-client privilege. She would offer to be her lawyer. Her phone rang again. It was her secretary.
“Your client Mrs. Monty phoned again.”
“Yes?”
“She said to cancel your prior plans, that she’ll meet you at your usual place instead.”
“Did she give any other specifics?”
“She said you would know where that was.”
“Okay, thanks,” said Daniella, and then thinking she should somehow explain things, she added, “She’s a little eccentric, but she’s loaded, so she’s a good client to have.”
She walked back to the living room, where Pete was still sitting on the sofa, studying the newspaper photo of the destroyed house as if it might tell him something if he just looked close enough. “Where is my usual place to meet Eve?” she asked.
His eyes widened. “She’s alive?”
“Yes. She called, gave an alias.”
“Thank God.”
Daniella felt that she might start crying, and so she made a joke instead. “Perhaps I should first try the Driving Club?”
“Didn’t you once tell me she took you to The Varsity a lot when you visited her in Atlanta?”
“That’s it! I mean, I can’t ever remember calling it ‘our place,’ but I did insist she take me there a bunch of times, and it’s so busy and crowded it’s easy to blend into the crowd.”
She went to her room, applied a light dusting of powder to her face and a little lipstick. She then went to Pete’s home office, where she kept a filing cabinet of her own. From the cabinet she pulled out a client agreement form.
• • •
It was only 10:45 a.m., but the lines at The Varsity were already long. Perhaps there was a convention in town. Back when Daniella visited Atlanta during the summer before they transferred to Barnard, she had made Eve take her to The Varsity three times in as many days and one more time on the way to the airport. But now that she lived within a couple of miles of it she never went. Same with the Krispy Kreme on Ponce, where the clerk plucked hot doughnuts off the conveyer belt just as soon as they rolled under a cascade of glaze. Maybe Krispy Kreme was where Eve wanted them to meet. Was that their “usual place”?
She would stay until eleven, and if Eve didn’t show up she would head over to Krispy Kreme. She kept her eyes trained on the door, looking for the woman she had seen the night before. She had already scanned the lines that had formed at the counters. But maybe Eve was already seated in one of The Varsity’s many dining rooms. And then she saw her walk through the door, her short hair covered by a floppy straw hat decorated with a yellow ribbon, as if she were playing at being the belle she once had been. She wore a loose dress in a floral pattern with a Peter Pan collar. She looked as if she were going to a Junior League meeting.
Daniella did not wave her over but walked up beside her instead. “Excuse me,” she said.
“Daniella!” said Eve, as if she were surprised to see her. “It’s Kitty! Kitty Monty. What a wonderful surprise!”
Eve held open her arms and Daniella stepped into them, holding on tight. Through the fabric of Eve’s tent dress, Daniella felt the small, hard bulge of her friend’s abdomen—a sign of malnutrition?—made more noticeable because the rest of her body was so skeletal.
“Will you join me for lunch?” asked Daniella, playing along as best she could.
“You know, I’m kind of craving something else,” said Eve. “Do you think we could go to the Waffle House? The one in Avondale?”
“It’s a good idea to zig and zag,” said Eve quietly. “Why don’t you get in line and order something to go, then meet me there in thirty minutes.”
“Okay. Sure.” She stepped in line behind a black family, the two children wearing sweatshirts advertising Atlanta. She imagined they were out-of-town tourists, visiting all of the sites. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eve exit through a different door than the one through which she had entered, as if she were an old hand at subterfuge.
• • •
Eve was already in a booth sipping a Coke when Daniella arrived at the Waffle House in Avondale half an hour later. Daniella sat across from her. The place was nearly empty.
“God, I haven’t had one of these in years,” Eve said, sipping her soda through a straw.
“Too decadent for the comrades?”
Eve gave a weak smile. “Pretty much.”
“Look, before we start, I think I should offer to represent you as my client. That way whatever we discuss is protected by attorney-client privilege.”
“Do you need money for our attorney-client privilege to go into effect?”
“Do you have money for a retainer?”
“I’ve got about three hundred dollars on me.”
“Okay, we’ll set the retainer at one hundred dollars, you can sign this form, and we should be good.”
As Daniella was getting the form out of her briefcase, Eve looked at her shyly. “Wow. You’re, like, the real thing.”
“That’s what happens when you go to law school,” Daniella answered. “So I’m presuming you know about the explosion that took place last night on Linwood Avenue?”
Eve’s eyes filled with tears. “Warren and I had a fight last night, a big one, and I slept over at a friend’s. When I tried to return to the house this morning, around eight thirty, the street was shut down. There were fire trucks and police cars all over and someone said a bomb had gone off.”
“So, what did you do? Ask around? Find a newspaper?”
Eve shook her head. “I guess I should have, but I didn’t. I just—I was in shock. I mean, Warren must have been behind it, and if he was there when it went off . . .”
Eve looked at Daniella plaintively and said in a choking voice, “Don’t tell me yet. I don’t want to know just yet.”
“Okay. We can take it slow. Let you digest things bit by bit. You say you went by the house around eight thirty this morning. But I didn’t get your call until around nine forty-five. What were you doing between the time you went by the house and when you called me?”
“I was at a church. Hiding out. I hadn’t stepped foot in a church in I don’t know how many years, but I went up to Druid Hills Presbyterian, just a couple of blocks from where we lived. The sanctuary door was unlocked. I couldn’t believe it. I went in and sat at a pew and thought of the words to every hymn I could remember. Somehow doing that made it so that I could breathe. I sat there for a long time, letting the hymn verses run through my head, and then clear as day I heard this voice say, ‘Call Daniella.’ And so I left the sanctuary and found a pay phone. I looked up your firm in the white pages. Kept calling until someone finally answered.”
If Eve was telling the truth, then that meant she didn’t know anything about J.T. “Do you know a man named J. T. Higgins?” asked Daniella.
“Yeah, he lived in the basement of our house. Not our house really, we just rented it.” She caught her breath, raised a hand to her mouth in surprise. “Oh God. . . .”
“His body was found among the rubble.”
“That can’t be! It has to be a mistake! He worked the graveyard shift. Always.”
“He called in to work sick. He had pneumonia.”
“Oh my God. I saw him. I saw him yesterday and he looked terrible.”
Daniella motioned to Eve to keep her voice down.
“I asked him if he was okay. Oh my God, poor J.T.”
“They think there was probably another person killed in the explosion. They found a pair of dog tags engraved with the name of Ho Chi Minh.”
“Warren,” Eve confirmed. “I knew it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Daniella, watching as tears ran down Eve’s face, as she wrapped her arms around herself, as she opened and closed her mouth, like a fish pulled from water.
Neither spoke for a few minutes, as Eve wept and Daniella watched, periodically handing her napkins from the dispenser on the table so she could blow her nose, wipe her face. When she finally seemed to be under control, Daniella asked her to describe, in detail, her whereabouts from the night before. She was not at all convinced that Eve was telling her the whole truth.
“I was with Warren, at the Linwood house. And then sometime around seven, I drove to the bookstore, where I saw you. Afterward I went to my friend Jane’s—she lives near Piedmont Park. Jane used to be in Smash, but she dropped out a little over a year ago, turned herself in and everything. I went to her house because I wanted to leave Smash, too. I wanted to know how she did it.”
“What exactly is Smash?” asked Daniella.
Eve sighed. “It’s a collective—a tribe. We thought—oh God, Daniella, it sounds so dumb saying it out loud. We thought we could bring down the United States government by bringing the war home, by being the vanguard who would force people to pay attention to the atrocities being committed in our name in Vietnam. We thought we would start the revolution and then working-class and black kids would join with us. . . .”
She paused, rubbed her temples with her fingers, looked pleadingly at Daniella. “I promise, at one point it all made sense. Everything was just going to hell in this country and we thought the revolution was at hand. I don’t even know who was in Smash other than a handful of guys who circled in and out of our apartment in New York, plus Warren, Abby, me, Jane, and a guy named Mack. Like I said, Jane surfaced. Mack took off for Canada, I think, and Abby went underground. For all I know, that was the entirety of the collective, though Warren always said there were Smash tribes in every city.”
Just then the waitress arrived at the table, dressed in uniform, holding a pen and an ordering pad. “Welcome to Waffle House,” she said. If she noticed that Eve had been weeping, she gave no indication of it. “What can I get you?”
Daniella hadn’t even looked at the menu. She scanned it briefly while Eve ordered hash browns.
“Covered and smothered?” asked the waitress.
“Just plain,” said Eve.
“Grilled cheese and a Coke,” said Daniella, adding, “Thank you.”
After the waitress walked away Daniella leaned forward in her seat. “Look, I’m going to ask you some tough questions, and I need you to be completely transparent with me so we can figure out the best plan for going forward.”
Eve nodded, lip trembling.
“Did you or any other members of your collective plant bombs other than the one that presumably went off last night at the Linwood Avenue house?”
Eve shook her head. “Not that I know of. Warren did keep dynamite, and a book on building bombs, but the book was more a historical artifact than anything, written about seventy years ago. Warren really loved the old-school anarchists, J. H. Most and Emma Goldman and such, and that book was his homage to them. I do remember Jane and him poring over Popular Mechanics magazines, back when we were all living together in a house in Little Five Points. That was around the time of the Weathermen townhouse explosion; I think they were just trying to figure out what might have gone wrong with their bomb. And I remember Warren and Abby once getting into a discussion about how you could use a drugstore alarm clock with the minute hand removed to set off a blasting cap. But that was all I ever heard or witnessed—just talk. I never saw Warren, or anyone else for that matter, making a bomb or in possession of one.”
“Eve, from what you’re describing it sounds like he most definitely knew how to build a bomb. Come on. Be honest with me. Be honest with yourself. You said the two of you had a fight before you went to the bookstore. Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t over the bomb he was planning to detonate?”
Eve shook her head. “I promise, the only thing Warren was planning was to go underground. We were already pretty much off the grid, but he wanted to truly disappear, like with a new birth certificate and everything.”
“So what was your fight about?”
“I told him I was done with Smash. I told him I wanted to turn myself in, that I wasn’t going to have a baby and be looking over my shoulder all the time, afraid of being exposed.”
Oh. She was pregnant. Of course. That was the protrusion Daniella had felt when they had hugged.
“How far along?” asked Daniella.
“My period’s been irregular for a while now, so I don’t know for sure, but I think about two months?”
“How did Warren react to the news of your pregnancy?”
More tears fell from Eve’s eyes. “He wanted me to have an abortion. We know a guy.”
“Are you considering it?”
“I have no business having a baby. I know that. But I can’t have an abortion. I just can’t. Everything has been dead in me for so long, and now there’s this life taking root. I’m not going to kill it. I’m not going to be responsible for killing one more thing.”
Jesus, who else had Eve killed? Daniella must have shown her alarm, because Eve grabbed her arm. “I don’t mean literally. I mean, killed one more part of myself.”
“Look, you really can tell me anything,” said Daniella, steadying herself. “I’m acting as your attorney. And with all of the switchbacks about where we were meeting today, it’s pretty obvious you think you’re being followed.”
“The brown shoes are everywhere,” said Eve. “The good thing is they’re so fucking obvious they’re pretty easy to spot.”
“What are brown shoes?”
“The brown shoes. You know: Hoover’s guys, the Feds.”
Jesus. Was she wanted on federal charges?
“Tell me what you could be arrested for,” said Daniella. “Tell me what they’ve got on you, so we can figure out how to go forward.”
“I just want to go home,” said Eve, burying her head in her hands. “I’m just so tired and I want to go home.”
“Look, if the FBI were to walk in right now and recognize you, would they arrest you for the murders of J. T. Higgins and Warren St. Clair, or would they charge you with, say, evading arrest during a protest?”
“Daniella, I swear, I didn’t know anything about the bomb that went off last night. I knew that Warren had a supply of dynamite, and I knew that he liked to talk of just ‘blowing up the whole system,’ but I thought he was all talk. I really did. A month or so ago he even talked about driving down to Fort Benning, figuring out where Lieutenant Calley lived, and blowing the place up. But he had no plan. He just liked to talk a big game.”
“Wait. He talked about bombing Fort Benning? Eve, you have to tell me these things! That could have been where he planned to detonate the bomb last night, and he accidentally set it off before he left the house.”
“I’m telling you, he was all talk.”
Their waitress returned carrying a grilled cheese and soda for Daniella and hash browns for Eve.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Daniella said, through clenched teeth, “Warren clearly wasn’t all talk, and the dynamite clearly wasn’t just some prop, because at some point he must have used it to build a bomb—the bomb that went off in the Linwood house, killing not only him but J. T. Higgins. That was action, Eve. That was murderous action.”
“I never thought he would go through with anything. I really didn’t. He was . . . I don’t know, kind of a pussy when it came to actual violence. The rest of the group gave him shit for that all the time. Abby used to call him the Cowardly Lion.”
“So maybe he was building the bomb to prove that he wasn’t all talk.”
“But there was no one left for him to prove himself to! I’m telling you, everyone had bolted. It was just the two of us. And I just keep thinking about how upset he was with me for choosing the baby over him, for leaving him, just like everyone else had. Maybe he just, I don’t know, felt so alone that he built the bomb with the intention of killing himself, not knowing poor J.T. was at home. . . .”
She paused for a moment, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I’ll never see him again.”
Daniella grabbed both of Eve’s hands in her own. “I know this is really hard,” she said. “And I wish we had more time for you to take all of this in. But I need to ask you something: Would you be willing to share everything you know about Warren with the authorities, including that he talked about bombing Fort Benning?”
“I don’t know. It feels like I’m throwing Warren under the bus.”
“Honey, Warren is dead. He’s already under the bus. There’s nothing you can do to hurt him.”
“But is it wise to mention the Calley threat? Wouldn’t I be in more trouble if I told them I knew about his plans, even if I didn’t think he would go through with them? Like you said, Warren’s no longer here . . . so why reveal anything I don’t have to?”
“Because they need to understand why he was building the bomb in the first place,” said Daniella. “Because they probably need to put some extra security on Calley, just in case Warren was working with someone else we don’t know about.”
Daniella paused for a moment, hesitating, but then pushed through her apprehension. “Also, I’m wondering if it’s possible that the reason you decided to leave Smash was because Warren’s talk was turning from theatrical to deadly.”
The two women stared at each other for a long, intimate moment.
“Yes,” said Eve, nodding along. “I knew it was time to get out when Warren started talking about bombing Calley. I just needed to figure out how to do it. I was scared to tell him I was leaving, so I needed to find a smart way to extricate myself.”
Oh God, what had she just done? Was it moral to plant a rationalization in a client’s head? Was it legal? Daniella took another bite of her sandwich, tasted the molten goo of the American cheese, the crisp of the fried bread. She washed it down with a sip of Coke as she watched Eve pick at her hash browns like a small child faced with soggy broccoli.
Dammit. She was a lawyer; Eve was her client, and she was going to represent her to the best of her ability.
“Here’s what I think our plan should be: I’m going to contact Bob Powers, one of the partners at my firm, who can help with the details of your surrender. He’s old-school, he’s well connected, and he knows protocol. He’ll be a good person to have in your corner, and I have a hunch he’ll be interested in your case.”
“Why?”
“Just a feeling. I’ve heard him lament that chivalry is dead, that sort of thing. I think he’ll feel chivalrous helping you. After we contact Bob, we’re going to contact the police, assuming Bob agrees that’s the best way to proceed. We’ll tell them that you are going to turn yourself in for any outstanding warrants. More important, you are going to tell them that you are willing to share any and all information that you have about Smash, including, of course, that it was you and Warren St. Clair living in the house on Linwood Avenue and that you knew he kept dynamite but did not believe he was building a bomb, until he ‘joked’ of trying to kill Calley at Fort Benning, at which point you still didn’t know if he was serious or not. But you decided it was time to surface, turn yourself in to the authorities. Hopefully your friend Jane will be willing to confirm that you spoke with her about turning yourself in before the bomb exploded.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this,” said Eve. “I’m just so tired. I just want to sleep.”
“You’re going to pretend your life is a movie,” coached Daniella, “and take it scene by scene. Our meeting right now is one scene. The next will be consulting with Bob Powers. Then the next scene will be dealing with all legal matters. I’ll be with you the whole way. All you have to do is show up. Just show up, and life will push you forward.”