Tell No Lies (10 page)

"Maybe not. But he's been thinking about it. He knows he's the darling of this office."

A chorus of laughter followed that comment, but it sounded to Jack as though they were laughing at Frank, not Jack. He wondered how many lawyers were in Frank's office.

"He's the darling of the office, Frank, because he's an excellent lawyer." It was Maria again. Jack couldn't help but smile. He was beginning to like Maria, her boldness. She wasn't afraid to take on Frank, even if he was more than ten years her senior.

"I think you're turning green, Mann." Kathy Ferguson was talking now, another senior prosecutor, definitely not intimidated by Frank. So there were at least four of them.

"Listen, Jack's a great guy." Barry Johnston. Five. "But I can understand where Frank's coming from. Once Earl tossed out Jack's name, it sort of shot anyone else's chances."

"But Jack hasn't even said he's going to run," said Maria.

"He's just playing hard to get. He likes it when Earl dotes on him." Obviously, Frank hadn't been paying attention. Earl had done nothing but ignore Jack since yesterday's lunch. "I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to take Barnard away from me and Jeff." Jeff had been assigned to second chair the case with Frank.

"You're crazy," said Kathy. "If Earl decides it's a capital case, Jack would run screaming from the courthouse before he'd agree to try it." Jack heard a lot of shuffling around. "I'm getting a bite to eat," she said. "Anyone coming?"
 

Jack wheeled around and ducked back into the copy room. Luckily, the copy room staff was on lunch break and he had the room to himself. He sighed. He and Earl had been close from early on and everyone knew it, but he'd never thought it caused a problem with others in the office. Things had obviously changed. Even though they'd all backed him—except Mann, of course—they saw him differently now. He felt like an outcast in his own home.

As the week wore on, his feeling of abandonment grew, and he found himself wondering why he hadn't heard from Jenny since their brief call on Monday. By the time he arrived at his office on Thursday morning, he'd decided to ask her to lunch. Maybe he'd even score some points for being the one to call first.

He hesitated for only fifteen minutes—the time it took to open his mail—before he picked up the phone. But she wasn't there, and he didn't leave a message. After all, what would he do if he asked her to call back and she didn't?

It was almost ten before she finally picked up, on his seventh try.

"Hey, it's me." He tried to sound nonchalant, undemanding.

"Hi." Sometimes she said "Hi, me," but not today. Her voice sounded distracted, as though she was in the middle of drafting a brief and it was still on her computer and she was only half listening to him.

"What are you doing?"

She laughed a little bit, derisively, he thought. "I'm training for a 10K race."

Dammit, she knew what he meant. "Where were you earlier? I tried to call you when I first got in."
And several times thereafter
.
 

"I went straight to Bankruptcy Court this morning. I had a hearing with Judge Fields. The creditors are trying to get him to dismiss my client's case because they haven't been able to put together a plan of reorganization. I had to go beg on their behalf to get one more chance."

He thought of her sitting in her chair, phone wedged between her ear and shoulder while her hands worked the keyboard. He knew she hated the speakerphone and only used it when others in the room wanted to be in on a call. He wondered what she was wearing. When she'd mentioned court, he'd immediately thought of what she called her "lucky suit." It was an odd green color, sort of minty like the original Crest toothpaste but maybe a shade lighter. On anyone else it would have looked ridiculous, but with her dark skin and black hair she could pull it off. In fact, on her it was stunning.

"A debtor?" he asked, teasing her. Newman didn't usually handle debtor work.

"Well, this isn't just any debtor." She was serious still, ignoring his teasing. "It's Mertz."

"Oh." He understood. The Mertz Corporation was a longtime client of Newman's, owned by a prominent St. Louis family. Newman would never have turned down the work. "Well, did you succeed?" he asked.

"Of course" was her immediate reply. He knew she wasn't bragging about her skills, or even referring to her good relationship with Judge Fields, but merely to the fact that a bankruptcy judge didn't like to dismiss a debtor's case unless he had absolutely no other alternative.

"Listen, Jack, I'm sort of in the middle of something right now. I don't have a lot of time to chat. Is there something specific you wanted?"

He swallowed. She'd never been so abrupt with him before. "Yeah, I . . ." He hesitated, wondered if he should just try another time. Maybe it was too soon. "I thought you said you just got back from court?" he asked instead.

"I did. But Stan laid a new case on me last night before I left, and he wants us to try to get appointed as creditors' counsel. I need to put together some sort of proposal by tomorrow." Stan Goldberg was her boss, the head of the corporate and bankruptcy department at Newman.

But she had to eat, didn't she? "Well, do you have time for lunch?"

"I brought my lunch today."

In all the years he'd known her, he couldn't remember her ever bringing her lunch. If she didn't go out for lunch, she just skipped it.

"Can't you save it for another day?" he suggested. And then he thought of a way: "I wanted to talk to you about, you know, Earl's job."

He could hear her sigh on the other end and knew it had worked. "All right. How about outside in the plaza, then? At noon. But half an hour is all I can spare."

After what had happened, he should have known she'd pick the least intimate place she could think of. But he'd take it. He could always grab a hot dog from a vendor.

"Okay, noon in the plaza." A half hour would do. A half hour was all he needed to get everything back to normal.

At eleven forty, his phone rang and he just knew it was her calling to cancel.

"Jack Hilliard." His voice rose at the end, as if it was a question, and the question was,
Okay, what's the excuse?
 

"Jack? Gregory Dunne here."

"Hi, Gregory." He instinctively stood up from his chair and tried to recover quickly. Had he given Dunne his direct dial? Maybe Beverly had just put it through. "How are you?"

"Good. Good. I enjoyed our lunch on Monday. All of us did."

"Yes, I did also. Thank you, again." He looked at his watch. Unless he got off quickly, he'd never make it by noon.

"I spoke to Earl this morning. He says you're still undecided."

Jack bit his lip to suppress his amusement. And surprise. He wouldn't have expected that from Earl, given his cold treatment all week. "He said that, huh?"

"He did. He thought we should get together again, talk a little about the process, you know, about what's involved between now and November. He's a little concerned that your uncertainty might stem from a lack of knowledge."

"Really?" Jack tried to decide how to respond. A lack of knowledge of what? How easily the voters would buy a lie? "Well, being more informed might alleviate some of my concerns."
Some, not all, Dunne
.
 

"I know November seems a long way off, but you'd be surprised how quickly it sneaks up. We have to name our candidate fairly soon. We'd need to start getting the money lined up by the end of May at the latest. Don't want to be slow out of the starting gate."

Jack dropped to his chair. Until this moment he'd felt like a kid play-acting, pretending that he could be District Attorney. It had all seemed so hypothetical, until now. Until Dunne mentioned money. Money made it real. Money meant someone deciding that he was worth the risk.

"No, I guess not," he said quietly.

"Are you available early next week? Earl said to fit it around your schedule."

Jack stared at the open calendar on the desk, but nothing registered. He'd spent the last eight years at Earl's beck and call, and Earl had said to fit it around Jack's schedule? Was it really only one week ago that Earl announced his resignation? He glanced at his diplomas on the wall, and then rotated his chair to look at a picture of him and Claire resting on the credenza behind him, next to the one of Claire that Earl had picked up last week. It had been taken on the day of their law school graduation. They had their black robes on, and their caps, both adorned with the extra gold tassel that recognized their positions in the top tier of the class. They had their arms around each other's shoulders, and they smiled broadly. God, they had been so young. He remembered thinking, How could they let twenty-five-year-olds be lawyers? He still felt too young, like an imposter. Would they really let a thirty-five-year-old run this office?

"Jack?"

"Yes?"

"Is something wrong?"

He swiveled his chair back around to his desk and sat up erect. "No, no. Actually, everything's great. I'm looking forward to meeting with you again. How's Tuesday?"

By the time they finished their polite chitchat—Dunne was especially talkative—it was almost five minutes after noon. He managed to get down the elevator, out of the courthouse and east seven blocks to the plaza by quarter after. It took another few minutes to find Jenny. She wore navy, not mint green, making it more difficult for him to locate her in the lunch crowd. She sat on the top step at the far end of the plaza, closer to her office than his. She held a half-eaten sandwich in her right hand and a bottle of water in her left. A paper lunch bag rested on the step next to her. She really had brought her own lunch.
 

She didn't look up when he approached. "You've got ten minutes, Jack."

Before he could apologize, she added, "You could have at least called."

"I couldn't call you; I was on the phone. I got a call as I was leaving from a guy I couldn't blow off."

She bit into her sandwich, took her time chewing and swallowing. "Couldn't you call him back? In fact, why'd you even pick up the phone if you were on your way out?"

He sat next to her and lowered his voice. "Frankly, I thought it was you, calling to cancel."

She crumpled the plastic sandwich bag and shoved it into the paper bag. She pulled out a banana. He took her silence to mean that maybe she had considered canceling.

"Well, who was so important?" she asked finally.

He looked at her, her eyes on the banana as she peeled it. They still hadn't made eye contact since he'd arrived. It occurred to him that her anger was merely a cover for her nervousness. He softened.

"Gregory Dunne." She shrugged and waited for more. "From the Democratic Party."

She whipped her head up, finally looking him in the eye. "You're serious?" He nodded. "What'd he want?"

"I had lunch with him Monday, him and some other guys."

"You're shittin' me."

"No."

"God, Jack, you've been holding out on me."

He watched an ant crawl on the ground between his feet. "Well, I haven't heard from you."

She grunted. "So pick up the damn phone! What, am I supposed to call you and ask if you've had lunch with the Democrats yet?"

She was right. He had been silly, he realized now. If he'd had something to tell her, he should have just picked up the phone and called her.

"So what happened? How come you had lunch with them? What did they say? Did you tell them about the death penalty thing? Are you going to run? What—"

He held his hand up. "Whoa! Slow down. I can only answer so much in my allotted . . ." He paused, looked at his watch dramatically. "What do I have left? Seven minutes?"

She nudged his leg playfully. "Screw you, Hilliard."

He cast a sideways grin at her. The Jenny he knew was back.

He spent the next twenty minutes telling her everything that had happened in the last week, including the phone call from Dunne moments before.

"Jesus" was all she said when he finished. They both gazed out into the center of the plaza, where a street musician with a guitar butchered Beatles tunes in the hope of a few coins in his guitar case. "Jesus," she said again. "It's yours, Jack." Her voice was low, reverential. "I mean, all you have to do is say the word, and it's yours."

She looked right at him. He studied her face and thought about how, if things were different, it'd be so easy to lean over and kiss her. He mentally chided himself for the thought. She was still talking; she couldn't know what he was thinking.
 

"I had no idea, when I said what I did Thursday night, that it was this real. I had no idea. I knew you could do it, I meant that, but I had no idea that Earl was thinking the same thing, and that he was already working to make it happen for you. And then when I saw your name being mentioned in the paper . . . It's yours."

"Yeah," he said, admitting it out loud for the first time. "I guess it could be."

"Could be? What do you mean, could be?"

"Jenny, I can't just lie outright. What am I going to say?"

"You'll say whatever you said to those party guys to convince them. Sounds like it did the trick."

"It's not that easy."

"Bullshit it's not. It's only hard if you make it hard." She shook her head in disbelief. "What more do they have to do for you? Dispense with the election altogether?"

When he didn't answer, she said, "You're a fool, Jack Hilliard. I think that's what Earl's been trying to tell you."

"Well, I've been called worse." As he said it, he spotted Frank Mann and Andy Rinehart walking toward them.

She tracked Jack's eyes; Frank and Andy came closer.

He leaned close to her ear, lowering his voice as they approached. "What I told you is just between you and me." Her familiar scent filled his nostrils.

"Well, if it's not the dancing queen and her escort," quipped Frank when he reached them. Jack wondered what Andy must have told him about Jenny's suggestive performance in the bar. He glanced at Jenny; she glared at Frank.