The Big Law (1998) Read online

  But in the dark…

  Like a guerrilla army, she owned the night. Her queen-size bed rustled with satin sheets, the air was moist and humidified, there were lotions, knowing fingers. She'd evoked in Tom something his pallid ex-wife of twelve years could never comprehend. Something called good sex.

  Then Tom and Ida had joined hands and skipped over the slim, but unforgettable, margin that separated good sex from great sex.

  "Can't we leave the light on?" he asked.

  "Why?"

  "I want to see you do things. In the dresser mirror."

  "No lights," said Ida.

  "Never?"

  "Not tonight. Sometime, maybe."

  "When?"

  "When you tell me what you've got going."

  "No. Oh." Yes. Some light, faint slivers, eked through cracks in doors, glowworms of moonlight noodled between the drapes and windowsills. Just enough to make her out, subtle and expert. Silky smooth white muscle, rising. Tongue out. Red Joker's grin.

  "C'mon, tell me what you're on to…" she whispered.

  They practiced together, keeping up their skills. Grouping the thrills in tidy clusters. Better together in practice than they would be in real life because they were not each other's first choice.

  They took turns pleasing each other. When her turn came round, she sighed:

  "Yes, Danny, yes."

  He held on. Shut his eyes. Pretended. She was Caren Angland and he could hit the jackpot and win the Pulitzer and he was someone else—the Danny of their closet rapture.

  His orgasm flamed in deep space. Elated and sad and lonely, he held realism in his arms, and in a moment of pure hell, he knew this was as good as it was ever going to get.

  10

  At 4 A.M. Phil Broker and his daughter slept on the Lake Superior shore, twenty-two miles south of the Ontario border. Two hundred seventy miles to the south, in Highland Park, Tom James snored in the soothing bondage of Ida's satin sheets. Twenty miles to the east of Ida's bed, the black water of the St. Croix River slid between rippled sheets of ice, below the Angland house. On the second floor, behind her locked door, Caren lay on top of a down quilt, rigid as a crusader chiseled on a medieval tomb.

  She wove tiny threads of hope in the dark. At the last possible moment Keith would catch himself and pull back from the edge.

  The phone rang. Keith's bed squeaked in the separate bedroom down the hall. He lurched awake. Thump, his feet struck the polished floor.

  Slippers slapped down the hallway past her doorway and descended the stairs. Sounds. Light switches. More footsteps.

  Ten minutes later, headlights swung through her windows. Tangled shadows from the oaks spooled across the wall above her headboard. The lights switched off. The antique door knocker on the front door rapped three times.

  Downstairs, the door opened. A brief muffled conver

  sation carried up the stairwell. Women circle and embroider their communication. The two male voices dumped their load of subjects and verbs like bags of sand. The door slammed.

  In the crash of the shutting door Caren felt the jolt of his anger gather primal force. He was cold gravel and ice, a fastmoving glacier who took the stairs two at a time. The knob on her latched door rattled. When she didn't respond, he hit the door with his heavy shoulder.

  The door splintered on its hinges. "God, you make me sick," he hissed as he pushed through the broken door. His breath smelled meaty with whiskey and rage. He wore his old Minnesota Gophers warm-up, with untied Nikes on his feet. Shoelace tips whipped the floor.

  He pulled her off the bed, pushed her down the stairs into the kitchen and shoved her in a chair.

  He was madder than she'd ever seen him. Her fear was emotional, psychological, moral. She still clung to the one truism that summed him up: He was the ice man, capable of anything except losing physical control.

  Keith ran a hand through his thick yellow hair, a vain gesture she had once thought attractive. Now she shuddered when he pointed to a black and white photograph that lay on the kitchen table. Her. Hands out, steadying Tom James in the Christmas tree lot. The photographer had caught the moment so it almost looked intimate. She was impressed how fast they'd had the film developed.

  "So now you're having me followed," she said.

  "Not me. Them." The words dropped from his lips. Clinkclink-clink, like three stacked coins.

  The kitchen closed in around them, a silent aviary of tile, stainless steel and polished wood where unanswered questions came to roost.

  Even now, if only he'd drop his damned arrogant front, she'd reach out to him. Try to understand. But he was too brilliant. And now he'd been seduced by the dark ness of his own big dumb shadow. Destiny was too kind, but not too strong, a word for him.

  "I have to know. Did you change or were you always like this?" she asked.

  "What? What?" Not even language, just an angry grunt.

  His eyes tracked around the kitchen and everywhere they touched she could imagine the red rampage of a laser, which, like Keith himself, was precise and destructive.

  She raised her hand to shade her eyes against a glare, but the cold December dawn gave no light. The room was barely lit by a fluorescent bar over the stainless steel range. The hollow glare was in her head.

  The slight movement tripped a hair trigger in him. His left hand whipped out—his hard cop's hand with his shoulder behind it like a leg of beef—and the heel of his open hand caught her alongside the right cheekbone and sent her sprawling from her chair onto the hardwood floor.

  Caren Angland was forty-one years old and she hadn't been struck in the face since grade school. Lights went tilt in her head. Not just pain. Something fundamental broke.

  "Low impulse control," she said, a stand-up girl through the sting of tears and a bloody nose. During their early years, when he was a ball of fire working the streets, he'd regaled her with stories about how blunt and obtuse the "assholes" were. How they'd go from zero to sixty on the stupid accelerator at the drop of an insult because they had low impulse control.

  He shook the picture at her and rolled his eyes. "Tom James? He's an idiot. They used to call him One Call James at the courthouse. He'll print anything."

  Caren's smile. White teeth outlined in blood: "He asked me if the FBI was investigating you?" Her eyes focused through a knotted veil of pain and gave him such a look he should die right there.

  "That little bastard," muttered Keith, his voice vacant, trapped, fatal.

  You dumb shit, she thought. Looking Medusa in the eye and you don't know it. You're stone. You're dead. Drop.

  How fickle the passion was that once wore the decorous chains of loyalty and commitment, and yes, love and sacrifice and everything they put in vows to make them stick. How agile it turned a somersault and bounced up spitting poison.

  He ignored her and stalked from the room, slapping the picture against his thigh.

  How one-pointed and inelegant was hate—now that she held it, unsheathed, in her hand. "You're going down, fucker!" she screamed after him, through the open front door, into the night.

  Mad. When the growl of his car had faded down the road, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, applied pressure and then packed tissue in her right nostril. Swelling and discoloration had already blurred the contour of her right cheek. She'd have a raccoon eye before lunchtime.

  The battered face, by itself, was enough to cost him his job.

  Stay mad. While she waited for the slight bleeding to staunch, she opened her prescription pills and methodically dropped the blue caplets one by one into the aquatinted toilet water.

  The psychiatrist who prescribed the antidepressants was a nice St. Paul liberal with Inuit stone sculptures on her desk. She believed in small dark corners in your past, and she'd kept probing for one in Caren's. Caren had played along, looking for that faraway dark little corner when really she was stuck all alone in the echoing rooms of this big, pitch black house with Keith, who was playing Faust.

  D
r. Ruth Nelson would have probably liked the Faust

  reference. She might have thought it an apt metaphor for the concessions her clients made to keep up in the 1990s. It would have been easier and cheaper if Caren had just told her, "Look, I was bad."

  Dr. Ruth believed in "disorders"; certainly she didn't believe in evil. Or that the devil could sit in Caren's basement in the form of Paulie Kagin and Tony Sporta from Chicago.

  Caren tugged at her wedding ring. Wanting it off. Swollen knuckles, water retention; it stayed. She flushed the toilet, turned and trekked through the blue rooms, up the stairs, stepped over the broken door into her bedroom and stripped off the now blood-dotted T-shirt she'd worn to bed last night. She pulled on jeans, a lined denim jacket. She resolved to keep it simple.

  She had to warn Tom James, the reporter. She had to go to Phil Broker and tell the truth. Get his advice about what to do next.

  Take her lumps.

  But Phil would be standoffish. Keith and Phil disliked each other, but they had history, all the way back to that bad night on St. Alban.

  She needed an intermediary. And this brought her back to Tom James. They could help each other. She could get him out of harm's way and whisk him with her up north. He could make the approach to Phil and explain it all. She could give James the information. The story.

  Find a way to make it his story. That way, she could stay out of the loop. That might work. A standing wave of dread rose up and mocked her. She ground her knuckles into her swollen face to freshen the pain. Pain revived anger and anger conquered fear.

  Better now, she went downstairs to the tool drawer in the breezeway, to the garage, and took out a cordless screwdriver. On the move, enjoying the sensation of motion, she made sure a Phillips driver was in the head. On the way

  down the stairs to the basement she tested the battery.

  Whirrrrr…

  Shouldn't have hit me, Keith.

  Uh-uh.

  So she stepped right up to the wall in Keith's paneled den, under the indifferent glass eyes of the stuffed white-tail and the stuffed antelope. He'd left room up there between the deer for her, the stuffed trophy wife. She removed the screws that fastened the vertical slats of stained boxcar siding.

  Time to get the "bricks."

  When she had yanked out six of the boards she could see the suitcase sitting in its nest of studs and sawdust. Compact square vinyl, the bag weighed almost fifty pounds. Twenny bricks Tony Sporta had said. That's ten packs to a brick, that's a hunnerd to a pack.

  Tony talked like that, swallowing his consonants. Keith's new partner.

  That's a hunnerd hunnerd dollar bills to a pack.

  Give the bag to Phil, Keith's old partner, and let him hand it over to the feds. Keith'll love that.

  She trundled it out into the den and carefully replaced the siding. A minute with the vacuum erased any evidence of sawdust on the shag carpet.

  Caren, five nine and strong, dragged and bumped the case up the stairs and down the breezeway. She opened the garage door, and the bluish predawn air flooded in, pristine as a new beginning. With bent knees, she stooped and heaved the suitcase into the back of the Blazer.

  She returned to the basement and entered the laundry room. There, between the washer and dryer and the water heater, the partition didn't go all the way to the ceiling. An unfinished spot that Keith had masked with imitation planters.

  She reached behind the dryer, pulled out a leather shoulder bag that contained a Panasonic video camera, and popped out the tape. She had warned Keith. If he wouldn't do something. She would. He thought her threats were just more of her "blue room syndrome." So…

  Caren's home movie featuring Keith Angland playing Faust, meeting with "Them."

  She'd just positioned the camera on top of the partition between the planters where it commanded a view of the whole den. She'd turned off the camera light, put in a thirtyminute tape, and when the time was right, just let it run. The thing was virtually soundless.

  On her way to the garage she picked up an overnight bag she kept packed in the hall closet. Toiletries and a change of underwear. Just in case.

  She tossed the bag in the car, turned and squared her shoulders. She craved a cigarette. Not a physical need, but a dramatic urge. There were no cigarettes in the house.

  She went into the kitchen, opened a cupboard and picked at a bag of chocolate truffles. She took one bite from the candy and set the remaining half down on the counter.

  Deep breath. As a girl, in Lutheran Sunday school, she'd been taught that God never tests you beyond your strength. She shut her eyes, tried to remember. Corinthians something. Too far away now.

  Most people are tested in little ways. So they talk to friends. If the test is moderate to serious, they may need a lawyer. Real trouble, they call a cop.

  C'mon God, who do you call if the trouble is your cop husband?

  Not fair. Being tested this hard. Her jaw trembled with emotion, thinking; Dad must have felt like this when all those Germans came at him out of the black winter forest.

  Because he didn't run, he made a difference. A man wearing a VFW hat said that at the funeral.

  Stay mad.

  She jammed numbers into the kitchen phone. First

  ring. She shut her eyes. Her lips moved silently. Second ring.

  "What," Phil Broker's voice, drugged from deep sleep.

  "It's me," said Caren, and it was as if just a few feet separated them across a dark room. Despite the hour and the bruised pain, she lightly touched her hair with her fingertips. Smiled. Which hurt. This was so crazy. She wondered if he ever thought of her. But his voice dispelled that fantasy quickly.

  "Caren," he said, flat, direct.

  The new wife was younger, vital—shot people in Bosnia with machine guns for all she knew. They had the kid. God.

  "I'm in trouble," she said with a tone of rising alarm just ahead of a wall of tears.

  "Calm down." Concern in Phil's voice sounded like a stallion stamping, impatient to be harnessed; moving him to old familiar ground, to the thing he loved most—a crisis. She knew that about him and counted on it now.

  Panic caught at her throat. She blurted: "I'm leaving him, Phil. He hit me."

  Broker asked, "Is he there with you?" She didn't answer. "Caren?"

  "I'm here. He's gone now."

  "Walk away. Get out. If you really want to pull the plug, call nine-one-one. Get some people around you."

  "Aw God, I'm so damn fucked up."

  "Just leave. Get in the car and drive." She didn't answer right away and his voice sped up. "You still there?"

  And she finally said it. "Phil. It's real trouble. I need help. I need to get someplace safe. I need to talk to you about what to do."

  One second ticked. Two. He decided, "C'mon up."

  "You sure?" Some hope.

  "Get moving. If you need some help getting out I can call—"

  "No caveman stuff, okay?" Getting stronger.

  "Okay. Just do it."

  She thought of the reporter, James. People had already been hurt. Gorski had been hurt dead. She didn't want James on her conscience. Tried to picture him. A nebbish, in need of a haircut, with glasses, soft blue eyes, a soft mustache and his rumpled corduroy soul.

  "I have one stop to make first. I might bring somebody." She hung up before he could respond and retrieved the card from her parka and punched in Tom James's home phone number.

  11

  Broker stared at the telephone on the bedside table and tried to change the subject, which was difficult when you're having a conversation with yourself.

  Kit stood up in her crib, through the connecting doorway, hands on the rail, doing chubby knee bends. She watched him, smelling like cow pie. Big X-ray eyes. With her ears like radar dishes and a fresh new mind that absorbed everything.

  Like him thinking—the first time he saw Caren she was standing in a Macalester College gym with a dozen other neighborhood women. Broker, the bad street cop, w
as there to teach a class in self-defense. To his hot young eyes she'd looked good enough to be in Hollywood. But she didn't go to Hollywood. She stayed in Minnesota and kept marrying cops.

  Broker rubbed his eyes. Zombie Daddy. He went to Kit, who had begun to cry, placed her on the changing table and changed a three-wipe pooper, dusted on powder, strapped on a dry Huggies and snapped her back into her sleeper.

  Then he walked with his baby on his shoulder.