The phone rang. She lifted the cordless and could see by the caller ID that the caller was at the security gate. “Hello?” she queried.
“Steph? It’s Fred. Want some company?”
There were dirty dishes, clothes on the floor, a week’s worth of mail opened and scattered on the table, papers to grade on the coffee table, and Stephanie was dressed in sweats and a T-shirt. No bra. Company? Grant had made the bed, vacuumed the carpet and dusted the furniture, but he hadn’t done anything with the bathroom. And Lord knew, Stephanie hadn’t cleaned it in ages. She was in absolutely no state for company. But Grant was gone—and Fred was calling.
“Fred, what a surprise!”
“I thought I’d drop by, pay you a visit. You gotta be bored, home alone every night.”
“You got that right. I’m starving. Want to go get a pizza?”
“I could go get one and bring it back to the apartment,” he offered.
But she didn’t want to entertain him in the apartment. “Fred, I haven’t been out in ages. How about Carbones? It’s right down the street.”
“Anything you want, baby,” he said, and Stephanie remembered back to a time Grant used to say that to her.
“Oh hey, the gate just opened. What’s your apartment number?”
“Just park in front of building eight, Fred, and I’ll be out in a couple of minutes. I’m fixing my hair.”
“Sure, but hurry up. Now that you mention it, I’m starving.”
Maybe a little jealousy would get Grant’s attention. She remembered when he had more time, was more devoted to her and never complained about her shortcomings. So she was a little messy. He worked long horrible hours. There had to be a compromise in there somewhere. Maybe, if she could just get her devoted man back, she could learn to be tidier.
But for now, she was going to get pizza with Fred. He was a little strange, but he was fun.
When she opened the apartment door she gasped; there he stood.
“I recognized your car,” he said, shrugging.
“Didn’t I ask you to just wait for me?”
“Oh, sorry. I wanted to do the gentlemanly thing.”
“The gentlemanly thing is always to do as the woman asks.”
“Gee, I’m a screwup.” He shrugged. “Come on, I’ll treat.”
Stephanie didn’t enjoy Fred’s company much; he was a self-absorbed braggart who seemed intent on telling her about every one of the women in his past. But, he did pay for the pizza and beer, and he did distract her from her annoyance with Grant. When he drove her back to her apartment at eleven, Grant’s truck was still not home and she got fired up all over again.
Without realizing she was going to do it, she said, “Freddy, I have two tickets for Grease. How would you like to go?”
Dennis and Charlene rescheduled their appointment with Agatha Farnsworth for one week later. Dennis was sitting in the parking lot in front of the Bridal Boutique when Charlene called him. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said. “I have a client in jail and he needs bail. I can’t reach a relative and Pam must be at her gym because I’m only getting her voice mail.”
“Do you like this client?” Dennis wanted to know.
“Yes, I do. Why?”
“Because if you didn’t like him you could let him sit there until we’ve seen the wedding consultant and had dinner.”
She laughed at this idea. “He’s going through a very nasty divorce. His wife, a real barracuda, had him picked up on bogus kidnapping charges during his legitimate visitation. He’s been through enough. I’m going to get him out of jail and then I’m going after her.”
Dennis could see Agatha moving around inside the boutique. She wore a peach-colored suit and dark silk blouse. She moved gracefully around the store, tidying up.
“I wouldn’t want to sit in jail if it were me,” he told Charlene. “I think I’ll see if I can buy Ms. Farnsworth dinner. If you get done downtown before too late, meet us at The American Grill.”
“There’s a hex on this wedding-planner thing,” Charlene groused.
But Dennis, who was actually not very disappointed, said, “It’ll all work out.”
He went into the store and Agatha greeted him with a smile that soon faded. “Oh, Dennis, where is your fiancée?”
“Bailing a client out of jail,” he said. And he smiled.
“Are you amused by that?” she asked, confused.
“In a way. Let’s go have dinner. If it’s not too late when Charlene finishes, we can come back here and look through some of your wedding books, talk about some ideas.”
She frowned. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
He smiled more broadly. “Absolutely sure.”
Six
The kiss of death was saying you wanted to clear your schedule to get married and take a short vacation. Suddenly all of Charlene’s clients ran for the phone to call her with one legal problem after another. While one client was falsely accused of kidnapping, another actually had her pet goose, Frankie, abducted by her ex-husband. In the first case, the courts could assist, in the second case there wasn’t a lot of law on the books to help out with the custody of a goose. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Everyone wanted to sue right now…and no one wanted to reconcile their bad marriages. Every will was being contested, every argument reached its peak and every adoption seemed to be falling apart.
New clients could be shuffled off on partners and associates, but many of these new legal issues were arising out of old client files, and Charlene couldn’t abandon them. Her clients relied on her.
Three weeks had passed since she and Dennis decided to get married, and their time together had been more scarce than usual. She had missed the first two meetings with the wedding consultant and was determined to make the third. She was on her way to meet Dennis at Flamingo Bay, a trendy restaurant near the river. They would have a bite to eat, talk a little about their personal expectations of a wedding and then keep the appointment with Ms. Farnsworth, who Charlene hadn’t even met yet.
But all that changed in an instant when her cell phone rang and Jake gave her some most unwelcome news. She made a U-turn with one hand on the wheel, punching up Dennis’s number with the other.
“I’m sorry,” she said to her fiancé, though her voice was not in the least apologetic. “I can’t make it. I just got a call that one of my clients has been hospitalized. I don’t know her condition, but I have to go.”
“You’re on your way there?” Dennis asked.
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“What hospital?” he asked.
“County.”
“Can I help? Should I meet you there?”
“No, I’ll be fine.”
“Okay. Then do you want me to go ahead to the wedding store at seven-thirty?”
Charlene was stumped for an answer. She finally heard her own drawn-out silence and shook herself mentally. “Ah…um…anything you want, Dennis. I don’t know how long I’ll be. This could be complicated…there are minor children involved in a custody dispute. Let me call you after I’ve assessed this situation,” she said. She didn’t realize what she was saying, what she was feeling. It didn’t occur to her, and wouldn’t until much, much later, that she was having an episode of déja` vu mixed with present urgency. Half of her was in the here and now, the other half had traveled a long way back in time.
Charlene had been in situations like this with Jake before, the first and most ancient of which occurred shortly after they met, over twenty-six years ago. They had been in a criminal justice class together at Berkeley and had just barely started dating. She wasn’t sure she even liked him. In fact, she was pretty sure it wouldn’t work out. He was too immature, too squirrelly. Indecisive, easily distracted and whimsical. She was serious, had serious plans.
But that night, as she was waiting for him to pick her up for their third date, an incident occurred that changed the course of both their lives. It started with Jake being late. She w
as not surprised; she had already judged him to be irresponsible. Even then, she was controlling and not about to let him get away with it. So she called his apartment. He answered, but was nearly incoherent.
What she understood from patched-together pieces of their conversation was that a crime had just taken place. One of his neighbors in his less-than-swank apartment complex had physically hurt a child. A baby. Jake was incensed. At first she didn’t even recognize his voice and then she could hear his red-hot rage. She could hear him trembling in anger. He had called for an ambulance and the police. He had thought it might be the 911 operator calling back, because she had asked him to stay on the line and he’d hung up on her. He was too busy to stay on the line. He was holding the suspect.
Charlene had gone to the apartment at once, partly to be sure Jake was all right and partly because of her own insatiable urge to be near the action. By the time she arrived, the place was a swirl of carnival-like emergency lights—ambulance, fire truck, police cars. The ambulance doors stood open and a woman peered inside, wringing her hands nervously. To the left was a man talking calmly to police, holding something like a rag or ice pack to his face. And to the right was Jake, speaking less calmly to police, flailing his arms in description, his face red to his scalp.
What Charlene didn’t know as she pulled up to that scene was that Jake had noted immediate evidence of sexual abuse as well as battery on this sweet little nine-month-old baby boy. Unmistakably, rape.
As she parked behind the police and got out of her car, all hell broke loose. A paramedic jumped out of the back of the ambulance, took hold of the young woman by her upper arms and shook his head sadly. The woman collapsed in agony. A cry of rage exploded from Jake. He blew through the police officers like a bull, crashed into the suspect and began to pummel him. He was completely out of control.
It took four officers to pull him away and hold him while they cuffed and removed the suspect, who later was convicted and put away for a nice long time. While the police held Jake, he lunged with such force his feet left the ground. They might as well have been holding a bird by the wings. He screamed obscenities with such wrath his voice was hoarse and almost soundless. “You cowardly, slimy, stinking son of a bitch! You want to beat up on someone? You want some action? You try me sometime, you fucking animal!”
What Charlene was not thinking as she missed yet another date with Dennis and drove toward County Hospital was how Jake’s fury and outrage had sewn the seeds of their relationship. His complete and unadulterated indignation that something this wrong could happen to an innocent had caused him to go berserk. When he was done screaming, he had cried. And when he’d shed enough painful tears, he had put his fist through the wall. It had taken her hours to calm him down and convince him that the police would do their job, that the perpetrator would come to justice.
And it also had excited her; she loved being close to that kind of energy.
Oh yes, she’d loved his slim grasp on control, his passionate desire to destroy that pervert. She didn’t dare leave him alone. Jake had had a shower, washed the blood off his knuckles, then let her comfort him while he became contrite and worried that his temper might hurt his chances with the police department. This was what really drove him, he confessed—helping people before it came to this tragedy and then, failing that, getting the scum that would sink to such depths of depravity off the streets.
She, for her part, was prelaw, and that night she knew she would be a family lawyer, an advocate for children. Women who found themselves trapped in nightmares like the one she had seen would come to her and she would liberate them. Family law would be her life. She saw it as clearly that night as she could see it now.
Between the two of them, that night so long ago, they were practically Robin and Marion. Of course, they never did go out on their date. They spent the entire night in bed, where the passion of outrage turned into the passion of healing, which quickly turned into the passion of passion.
But Charlene wasn’t thinking of any of that, even though she was possessed of a familiar emotion and strongly suspected she’d done all this before. She was consumed with thoughts of Meredith Jersynski in the hospital and what she would find when she got there.
She had expected to find Jake waiting for her in the E.R., but he was not. Instead, seated in the chairs outside the exam rooms was another police officer Charlene happened to know, Jake’s friend and co-worker, Sam Jordan. She was brought up short by the surprise. “Sam?”
He looked up. “Oh, hi, Charlene. Jake said he called you.”
“Did he ask you to wait for me?” she asked.
“No, I’m waiting for Merrie. She’s one of our special projects. Did Jake tell you what happened?”
“No. Is she going to be all right?”
“Someone took a shot at her, Charlie. She was about a block from Coppers where she serves, and someone took a shot at her. Right through the wind-shield.”
“My God!”
“Missed her, but she ran her car right into a pole, hit her head and lost consciousness for a little while. Looks like she’s going to be just fine, though.”
“Except that someone shot at her.”
“Yeah, except that. Someone tried to kill her, and for what?”
Charlene just shook her head. For what, indeed? It looked, for all practical purposes, like Meredith was going to have a hard time keeping her daughter away from the father, so all he had to do was exercise a little patience. Why screw it all up by getting in trouble with the law?
“You called Meredith your what? Your project?”
“You know,” he said, glancing down the hall toward the exam rooms to see if she was coming yet. “One of our girls.”
“What do you mean, one of your girls?” she asked.
“Jake didn’t explain?”
“No! Go on.”
“We have a few girls—sorry, I’m such a dope—women we’re helping out. Women who are trying to get on their feet after a bad deal. Like getting out of a bad marriage. Abuse or whatever.”
Charlene slowly sank onto one of the chairs. “Whatever?” she pushed.
“Well, let’s see. We have a couple of women coming out of the bad end of addiction, trying to stay clean, earn money and get their kids back. One we’re helping keep safe from a pimp—but she’s gotta stay out of the business, you know. Merrie here, she came out of a shelter. We got her a job waitressing at Coppers. Old cop bar. And we found her an apartment in the same building as one of our guys. We have a fund that subsidizes her income until she can get on her feet.” He took a breath, looked down at his hands. “Jake said you were doing a pro bono on this here. Gee, Charlie, we can’t thank you enough for that. Legal help, decent legal help that is, gets real expensive, puts a drain on our resources.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know you were doing a pro bono?” he asked, confused.
“No,” she said. “No, I didn’t know there was a group of you doing things like this.”
“Yeah. We keep it kind of quiet. There’s no waiting list to get in the program or anything. I mean, we’re official and everything. We even got set up with a lawyer and accountant, both volunteers because we’re tax free….”
“Exempt,” she corrected. And then she thought back over all the favors Jake had asked of her over the past several years. Had they all been for these “projects?”
“How many of you are there? Doing this?” she asked.
“I think we’re up to thirty now…something like that. We keep an eye open for anyone who has a good chance of getting out of the system, with a little help. ’Course, we got people in the shelters and recovery programs who also keep an eye open, and they know we’re real picky. It has to be special circumstances, like this one.”
“What makes Meredith special?” she wanted to know.
“She’s sincere, determined. She put the kids first, and went to the shelter on her own steam. Her story stays the same so we’re sure she?
??s telling the truth. This kid hasn’t had a break in a long, long time. And she’s clean, not using anything or selling anything. She just needs a second chance.” He grinned. “Her kids are real sharp. Little Einsteins.
“Now, I figure the thing to do is get her to a safe house. No one knows whether that bullet went into her head or the upholstery in the car, so we have an edge here. They were careful with the accident report and the emergency room docs are going to cooperate with us. So, we know more than he knows, right?”
“Did you have someone pick up the kids?” she asked.
He nodded. “Right away. They’re at the substation now, waiting for their mom. Then I’ll take them all to a safe house. And we have someone sitting at Merrie’s apartment to see if anyone shows up there looking for the kids.”
“And where’s Jake?”
“He decided he wanted to have a little conversation with the ex.”
“Uh-oh,” she said.
“He won’t blow it, Charlie. He’s one of the best interrogators I know.”
“But he’s a hothead. And this girl’s important to him.”
“They’re all important to him.”
“She isn’t…? Are you sure she’s not…a girlfriend?”
Sam laughed. “Absolutely sure. Why? You think she’s his type?”
“He’s had many types, Sam,” she said. “Where does the ex live? I’d better get over there before he screws up my custody case.”
Just as she wrote down the address, Meredith came toward them wearing a white bandage on her forehead. She was clearly flustered, but thanked Charlene for coming to the hospital and begged Sam to hurry up and get her to her daughters.
“Do everything the police tell you, Meredith,” Charlene said. “When you get to a safe place, call my cell-phone number. If I don’t answer, leave your new number on the voice mail. And don’t worry. You’re going to be all right now.”
Dennis decided against Flamingo Bay and went instead to a dilapidated steak house at the bottom of the city, near the river. The down on its luck end, not the renovated, chic river walk full of pricey restaurants, clubs and shops. This place was a little on the edgy side. The owner was an old guy who had been there over thirty years; improvements were made every twenty or so. Charlene wouldn’t eat there. She said it made her skin crawl. So Dennis went in protest. He ordered a New York strip, bloody. French-fried onion rings, greasy. Beer, tall and icy.