Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken (3 page)

She viewed her diminutive size as a competitive advantage, though. People tended to underestimate her. It was as though they expected her to be weak or childlike just because she was small. Opposing attorneys sometimes failed to adequately prepare when they squared off against her for the first time. They were always prepared the second time.

“That’s me,” she said, searching her memory to try to place Lang.

She had a fuzzy recollection of Ellen’s husband as some type of scientist with no sense of humor. If she had the right guy in mind, Greg had trapped her date at one of Prescott & Talbott’s cocktail parties and talked at length to him about polymers and the dangers of BPA.

Of course, her date had been partially at fault. Ben, a chronically underemployed independent filmmaker, had thought he was being funny when he’d answered Greg’s question about what he did for a living by saying “I’m in plastics.” Greg apparently had never seen
The Graduate
and hadn’t gotten the joke.

“I’d like to come over and talk to you,” she said.

“Of course,” Greg said, all business now.

Sasha pulled her old Prescott & Talbott attorney directory from her top desk drawer and looked up Ellen’s home address. The telephone number matched the one Will had given her.

“Are you still on Saint James Place?” she asked.

“Uh, yes, I’m keeping the house. For now.”

“Great. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Twenty, tops.”

“You want to come here? Now? This isn’t a good time. The house is a mess, and I have some errands to run this afternoon. Why don’t I come to your office tomorrow?”

“Listen, Mr. Lang,” Sasha said, “I’m trying to determine if I’m the right person to represent you. To do that, I need to meet with you. If you aren’t interested in my services, that’s fine. If you are, I suggest you reschedule your errands.”

Although she halfway hoped he’d refuse to see her, thereby solving the problem of whether to represent him, she collected a notepad, pen, her wallet, keys, and mobile phone as she spoke and swept them into a light blue leather laptop case that matched her sweater.

Greg Lang huffed and puffed and then finally said, “Fine.”

“Great. Goodbye.”

She hung up and shut down her laptop. That went into the bag, too. Then she turned out the lights, locked the door behind her, and hurried down the stairs to the coffee shop.

The point of springing her visit on Lang was to see him on his home turf. Sasha believed she could learn a lot about a person from seeing him in his natural environment. She would have preferred to show up unannounced so that he wouldn’t have time to clean up or hide anything, but that would have been unprofessional. The best she could do now was get over to his place quickly.

Sasha made it a habit to meet people at home. She’d started the practice after she’d stopped by the home of a well-regarded economist to drop off an expert witness report for her to review. Sasha’s expert had answered the door at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in a bra and panties, expecting to find the male exotic dancer she’d picked up the night before, not the attorney who’d retained her to testify in a commercial dispute. Although Sasha didn’t particularly care what Professor Robbins did in her spare time, she did think some discretion was in order considering she held herself out as an economic expert to the tune of seven hundred and fifty dollars an hour. The last thing Sasha needed during trial was to have to rehabilitate the credibility of a woman who, as it turned out, claimed her patronage of male sex workers was an effort to support and legitimize an underground economy.

Despite the threat of rain, she decided to walk. Greg’s house was just about a mile away, and she could use the air. She confirmed there was a travel umbrella in the bottom of the laptop bag, then slung the bag across her chest diagonally, like a messenger bag, and headed toward Ellsworth Avenue.

She’d never been inside Ellen’s home, but she knew the street from her running route through the neighborhood. Saint James Place was a short street that ran between Fifth Avenue and Ellsworth; the homes there could fairly be called mansions. Both sides of the street were lined by hulking hundred-year-old Victorians set back behind wrought iron fences. None of the homes on Saint James looked to be smaller than six thousand square feet, and several of them were considerably larger. Ellen and Greg had no children. Sasha tried to imagine what they did with all that space.

She crossed against the light, jogging through the intersection, although no cars were in sight. As she turned onto Ellsworth, the wind picked up and she pulled her cardigan tight. She stopped in front of a massive, pre-war apartment complex to check the time. It had been six minutes since she’d left the office.

A dime-sized raindrop splashed onto her arm. Followed by another.

She was a little more than halfway there. Options were to take out the umbrella and mince her way along the wet sidewalk in heels or to take off her shoes and run for it.

She ran for it.

The rain was cold on her face, but the fat drops were still long seconds apart. She felt as though she really were dodging them. She opened her lungs and her stride and sprinted, flat out.

She stopped in front of a painted lady Victorian done up in yellow, green, and pink. An iron gate with scrollwork detail cut into the six-foot fence was unlatched and hanging ajar.

This was it.

She squeezed through the open gate and hurried up to the wide, columned porch. She took her shoes out of her bag and put them back on, then shook the water from her hair and caught her breath. Then she wiped her hands on her sweater and stepped up to the door to ring the bell.

A shadow passed behind the stained glass transom window, and the door jerked open before she could press the doorbell button.

“Don’t you have a car? Or an umbrella?” Greg Lang said.

He stood to the side and let her pass into the entryway.

He was the humorless scientist she remembered from the cocktail party. Tall and stooped, with a shock of red hair. Green eyes that might have been soft and kind at one time but were now bloodshot and dull.

Sasha ignored his questions and stuck out her hand, “It’s good to see you, Mr. Lang, although I wish it were under other circumstances.”

He shook her hand with a lazy grip, taking just her fingers in his hand.

“You might as well call me Greg. Can I call you Sasha?”

“Sure.”

He led her over to a seating arrangement in front of a fireplace surrounded by green, black, and brown mosaic tiles. The chairs faced an enormous staircase carved from dark wood with thin, intricate spindles.

“Let’s talk here in the sitting room,” he said, taking a seat in a formal wingback chair covered in a dark green and brown paisley silk.

She lowered herself into its mate. They were in what was essentially a hallway. From her seat she could see solid wood pocket doors leading to three rooms. All three were closed off.

Greg reached for a cut-glass decanter that sat on the table between the two chairs. It held an amber liquid. “May I offer you a drink? Scotch? Something else?”

“No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and tipped a generous pour into a dirty-looking tumbler.

In fact, the entire place, majestic as it was, looked a little dingy. As if it hadn’t been thoroughly cleaned in weeks. A musty funk hung in the air. It smelled like wet dog. She wondered about the condition of the rooms behind the closed doors.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” she said.

He stared into his glass. “I suppose I should be the one thanking you for even considering to take my case. They say you’re very good.”

“I’m an experienced litigator, Greg, but I trust Will told you I have no criminal law experience.”

“He did. I don’t care. Ellen always said you were a superstar. I need a superstar.”

His face didn’t soften at the mention of his dead wife’s name. He leaned forward and searched Sasha’s face. “Will you take my case?”

“I don’t know. Why do you need a superstar?”

He frowned. “What?”

“You’re innocent, right? Why do you need a superstar lawyer?”

Anger flashed across his face, but he controlled his voice. “Don’t be cute. I know how things look. The divorce proceedings, the razor. And ... I found her.”

He looked toward the pocket doors that closed off the room to the right of the front door, staring at the dark wood.

Sasha followed his eyes. “Is that where she was?”

He nodded. Didn’t speak. Dragged his eyes back to hers.

She stood and ignored the lump in her throat. “Walk me through it.”

He sighed but didn’t argue with her. He deposited his tumbler on the table with a heavy thud and led her over to the doors.

He slid the doors open, careful to push them into the recessed area of the wall, and stood back. From behind him, Sasha could see into the room. It was a good-sized square, with floor-to-ceiling cherry bookshelves on three walls. The outside wall housed a large window, with a built-in, cherry bench running its length beneath it.

The window looked out onto a flower garden that may have been a riot of color and beauty at one time. Now tall weeds choked the handful of late summer roses that were still in bloom, and the heather was drying from purple to brown. Rain drummed against the window.

Sasha waited for Greg to go into the room, but he stood rooted in place in the doorway. She walked around him and stood in the approximate middle of the room. She thought she smelled the metallic tang of blood, but that had to be her imagination. That smell would be long gone by now.

“Was this Ellen’s office?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Mine was—
is
—upstairs.”

She’d assumed as much. Legal journals formed a neat stack on one corner of the desk, and law books lined at least a third of the shelves. There was one section devoted to biographies and another to literary fiction. Photographs displayed in silver frames in a mix of sizes were scattered on several shelves in a deliberately casual way, as if Ellen had had a designer’s help. Ellen and Greg smiling on a ski lift. Ellen in a cap and gown, standing between a beaming older couple. A large black-and-white candid shot of Ellen and Greg sitting under a leafy tree; she was leaning against his chest, her eyes closed and her lips parted, her face upturned to the sun, and Greg had his arms wrapped around her, looking down at her with a tender expression. Sasha felt a lump in her throat at the obvious love they’d once shared and turned her attention to the next picture.  It was a photo of Ellen, beaming, along with two other women, all dressed in ball gowns, their arms linked.

Sasha narrowed her eyes and reached for the picture. As she picked it up, Greg muttered something she didn’t catch.

“Pardon?”

“I said, The Terrific Trio. That’s Ellen, Martine Landry, and Clarissa Costopolous. At their first Prescott & Talbott holiday party. We weren’t married yet.”

Sasha recognized all the names, although the grinning, youthful beauties in the picture were a far cry from the serious power hitters in sensible suits they would become.

“The Terrific Trio?”

Greg nodded. “They were all in the same summer class. Someone on the recruiting committee named them that and it stuck.”

Sasha returned the picture to its spot. A thin trail of dust curled up from the shelf.

“Clarissa is still at Prescott & Talbott. I know Martine by name, but she was gone by the time I got there.”

Greg nodded again, “Martine made partner very quickly under the old system. It took her about five years. By then, she had had her first child and was working a reduced schedule when the firm elevated her to partner. When she was pregnant with her third, she and the firm agreed to part ways. She got her buy-in money back and a decent lump sum. I think she’s teaching legal research and writing as an adjunct at Duquesne now.”

“And, Clarissa is a new equity partner.”

“Yes; after Martine left, the shine was off The Terrific Trio. Ellen and Clarissa started calling themselves themselves The Tainted Two. It took them a long time to make partner; Ellen longer than Clarissa. And, of course, by then, there were two tiers of partner: income and equity. Ellen thought income partnership was just a way for the firm to delay making a real decision about its female lawyers until their childbearing years were over. I’m sure you know all this.”

Sasha knew that partnership decisions were made primarily by men who had stay-at-home wives to raise their kids and run their households. But she wasn’t interested in discussing gender equality and the glass ceiling with Greg.

“Sure. Okay, so, let’s talk about what happened the night Ellen died.”

Greg was still in the doorway, unwilling or unable to come into the room where his wife died.

He cleared his throat. “Uh, I came home around ten—“

Sasha looked up at him, surprised. “You were both living here? I thought Ellen had initiated divorce proceedings.”

He reddened.

“She had, but yes, we were both still in the house. I was hoping we could reconcile. And, well, to be frank, I had been let go at work. Renting an apartment seemed silly until I found a new job. This place is huge,” he said, sweeping his arms wide. “We more or less divided the house. I stayed on the third floor when she was home. But, you know Ellen—she was always at work, anyway.”

Sasha nodded. Ellen had probably been at the office from eight-thirty or nine every morning until well after eight at night. They wouldn’t have had to interact much.In fact, she wondered if they’d interacted much before their marriage had hit the skids, given the realities of Ellen’s work life.

“Okay, so you came home at ten in the evening?”

“Yes.”

“From where?”

“Excuse me?”

“Where were you?”

Sasha walked over and sat on the cushioned window bench. She didn’t really want to sit behind Ellen’s desk, but she hoped moving to the far side of the room would draw Greg in from the doorway so she could see him better while he spoke.

Behind her, the rain continued to beat against the glass.