Devil's Corner Read online

  “Our cholesterol was too high, and so was our blood sugar.”

  “Really.”

  “Now our levels are a lot better.”

  “Good.” Vicki hid her smile. Her parents spent every minute together; driving to the office, working across the hallway from each other, then driving home in the same car. They had met at Villanova Law School, married upon graduation, and gone into practice together. Their marriage was all the more solid for their togetherness, although now that they were sharing the same blood sugar, Vicki suspected that they were physically fusing and soon would become conjoined twins.

  “We use only Splenda now. It’s a sugar substitute.”

  “Splenda. It sounds so cheery.”

  “Make fun, but I lost five pounds the first two weeks.”

  Vicki blinked. “I wasn’t making fun, Dad. That’s great, that you lost five pounds.”

  “No, it isn’t. The book says you should lose seven. I listened to it in the car, on CD. Your mother lost seven.”

  “Five isn’t much less than seven. It’s only two.” Math genius.

  “Fewer.”

  “Huh?”

  “You said less. You meant fewer.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” English genius, too. “In any event, two fewer pounds doesn’t matter.”

  “It does to me.”

  “Oh.” Vicki sighed inwardly. It was almost impossible to agree with her father, even when you were faking it. He was a man who never took yes for an answer. She suddenly regretted coming home. She should have gone to Olive Garden.

  “Sugar is poison,” her father added. He unfolded his napkin and set it on his lap, then rested his arms on the side of the table. The strains of The Marriage of Figaro lilted from a CD player in the kitchen, followed by her mother, humming along. Her father tapped his index finger in time, though he would never sing, as much as he loved opera. He seemed preoccupied, and Vicki knew he had to be thinking about Morty and Jackson’s murders.

  “Dad, about last night—”

  “Let’s wait until your mother comes in. I know she wants to hear, too.”

  “Okay.”

  “This way you won’t have to repeat it.”

  “Or repeat it all over again.” Vicki smiled at her own joke, because somebody had to. Her father was listening to the opera wafting from the kitchen, tapping his finger. She changed subjects. “Dad, guess where I was tonight?”

  “Where?”

  “Washington Street.”

  “Washington Street?” Her father’s eyes flew open. “In Devil’s Corner?”

  “Yes, I even saw your old house.”

  “Really.” His eyebrows lifted higher, just as her mother returned with an empty plate, which she set in front of Vicki and filled quickly with one of her own lamb chops and two broccoli spears. Between them, it wasn’t enough food for a corgi, and Vicki felt a wave of guilt.

  “Mom, that’s all right. I’m not that hungry.”

  “I won’t hear of it. I had a huge lunch.” Her mother smiled and went around the table to her seat. The barber of Seville was bragging in the background. The dog returned to gnawing on Vicki’s shoe.

  “I was saying that I was on Washington Street today, Mom. I saw Dad’s old house.”

  “Really?” Her mother tossed her shiny helmet of dark hair. “How did it look?”

  “How do you think it looked?” her father interjected. “We can’t all be from Hilltown.” Hilltown was her mother’s old neighborhood, which was nicer, some ten blocks east of her father’s. Her mother let it pass, but Vicki was puzzled by his grumpy reaction.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “Of course not, Victoria.” Her mother’s green eyes lit up. “You know your father doesn’t like to be reminded of his humble beginnings.”

  “It’s not that, Lily,” her father said, turning to her mother. Vicki couldn’t see his face from that angle, but she knew what it would look like. “It’s a horrible neighborhood now. A ruin.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “Washington Street, my block, it’s a slum now.” Her father sipped water from a glass frosty with ice.

  “Did you know the alley behind it, Cater Street?”

  “Of course. How do you know Cater?”

  “I get around,” Vicki said, to make him smile, which it didn’t. “I was driving through Van Buren and Lincoln Street.”

  “All the best places. Hope you kept the windows rolled up.” Her father stabbed a spear of broccoli, and her mother avoided anyone’s eye.

  “Dad, was there a vacant lot on Cater when you were growing up?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you have any old pictures of Washington Street or the house? Maybe in Grandma’s stuff?” Vicki’s grandmother had died ten years ago, and her grandfather well before that. As soon as her father had had the means, he had them both moved into a gated retirement community in Chester County.

  “No. I don’t even know where your grandmother’s things are.”

  “In the attic?”

  “No. I didn’t save those things, did I, Lily?”

  “You saved nothing,” her mother answered.

  “Too bad.” Vicki thought a minute. “You went to Willow-brook High School, right?”

  Her father set down his fork. “Why the questions?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “Victoria, it wasn’t high school like you went to high school.

  Like Episcopal or another private school with nice green fields. Lacrosse, Parents’ Day. It wasn’t pleasant. We were poor. You can’t imagine how poor.”

  As poor as the people who live there now?

  “My father worked day and night, three jobs, to make ends meet. I don’t think I ever saw him sit down in a chair, not once.”

  “You’ve been crabby all day, Victor,” her mother said softly.

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “You have, too.” Her mother faced Vicki. “We lost a house client this morning. Remember Carlon Industries, the dry cleaners?”

  “Sure. Jerry Solomon, right?” Vicki’s parents did so much business entertaining that she had grown up around their clients and their wives, like Olive Garden families had uncles and aunts. Michael, Sam, and Carol clustered around the Allegrettis’ dinner table. They counted as family, evidently until they fired you.

  “Yes. Yes. Good for you.”

  “It wasn’t Jerry, it was the son,” her father said, but her mother waved him off.

  “Please, it was Jerry. He’s hiding behind his own son, the coward.” Her mother turned to Vicki. “Anyway, Jerry had eleven locations. As you know, we’ve done all his closings for years, and he let us go today. It was a blow for us.”

  “We’ll do fine without him,” her father said, gruff. “The son was a slow pay anyway. Receivables of six months’ standing. It’s enough, already.” He turned to Vicki, miffed but trying to hold it in. “That’s not what I want to talk about, anyway. Your mother and I want to know what happened last night. If I’ve been crabby today, that’s why.”

  “That’s not completely why, Victor,” her mother corrected, but her father ignored her.

  “We pieced together what we could from the newspapers. Why don’t you fill us in? Our only child is on the news, involved with violence, a multiple homicide, a shooting, and we hear nothing but a phone message.”

  “I told you we should have stayed up for the news,” her mother interjected. “Were you on the eleven o’clock news?”

  “I was. A case agent I’ve been working with was killed last night.” Vicki gulped chilled water, hoping it would get past the sudden lump in her throat. The barber was singing happily in the kitchen, an ironic soundtrack to Morty’s shooting, flashing through her head. “His name was Bob Morton.”

  “I saw it in the newspaper account, and online. I thought I knew that name.”

  “We won that case together, Edwards? Morty was his name.”

  “Yes, I remember now. He
was killed, and a pregnant woman, a black, was shot in a house.” Her father’s dark eyes grew hard as onyx. “It said you were inside the house at the time of the shooting. Were you?”

  “No, I wasn’t inside when it happened.” Vicki reflected that maybe she hadn’t learned to lie in law school. Maybe she had learned it at this color-coordinated table. “I was outside at the time and I’m fine.”

  “The newspaper said you were inside.” Her mother set down her fork, waiting.

  “The newspaper got it wrong. They want to sell papers.”

  “But you were there at the house last night, weren’t you?”

  “It’s part of the job.” Vicki checked her temper, and her father tugged the napkin from his lap and set it down on the table. She knew he wouldn’t be eating another bite tonight. He could lose those extra two pounds in no time. The corgi, on the other hand, was making a meal of her shoe.

  “You’re in the wrong job, Victoria.” Her father shook his head. “Two people killed. If this experience doesn’t change your thinking, I can’t imagine what will.”

  Morty.

  “I don’t know why you don’t just come to work for us. This is getting ridiculous. My God, what does it take to wake you up?”

  Here we go.

  “If you like criminal law so much, you can practice criminal law with us. We have only the four associates now, with Rachel going on maternity leave. You can do white collar defense. We get those matters all the time, referrals from the big firms.”

  “That’s criminal defense, not prosecution.”

  “Don’t be so picky!”

  “I’m not being picky!”

  Her mother raised a hand, her mascaraed eyes widening in alarm. “Wait, Victoria. Am I to understand that you were at a home when two people were shot to death?”

  “I told you, Lily!” her father exploded, turning on her mother.

  “Dad, please don’t yell,” Vicki said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Of course she was, Lily! That’s what she’s saying! That’s what she does! She’s in the gun and violent crime unit, or whatever they call it! It puts her directly in harm’s way!”

  “You could have been killed?” her mother asked, shaken.

  Vicki felt stunned at her mother’s pain, which appeared as unexpectedly as a tornado in the middle of Broad Street. She must have been tense the whole day, her anxiety an undercurrent to the quotidian tasks of answering e-mail, taking phone calls, and attending closings. They had probably fought about it on the way home.

  “Victoria, I simply don’t understand you anymore.” Her mother’s light eyes glistened. “How can you do that? How can you? It’s as if you intentionally want to hurt us.”

  “Mom, that’s crazy, it’s not intentional—”

  “I beg to differ,” her father interrupted. His skin flushed so brightly she hoped he’d taken his Pravachol. Seville seemed far away, but the dog wasn’t. “At this point, isn’t it intentional? To persist when you know how we feel?”

  “Dad, it’s not about you.”

  “No, it’s about you. Because you, for some reason, want to hurt us, when we have given you everything. You even make much less than you could earn with us and you’ve no equity! You’re not even building toward anything!” Her father stiffened, struggling to keep a civil tongue. “You know, if we owned a family farm, you would take it on, no questions asked. But we own a family law firm, and you refuse. You feel justified in refusing. And to add insult to injury, it’s not that you don’t want to practice law, which perhaps I could understand. No, it’s that you don’t want to practice our kind of law. That’s like saying, I’ll grow alfalfa for my family, but not corn!”

  “It’s different from—”

  “No, it isn’t! You’re a lawyer, Victoria, and you know about foreseeable consequences. If you can foresee the consequences, you are charged with intending them, are you not?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “So it’s foreseeable that our firm, without anyone to leave it to, will simply be” — her father was so angry, he was at a loss for words, which was as angry as he ever got — “defunct. The Allegretti firm will simply cease to exist. And you know this and you persist nonetheless, so you are charged with intending that consequence. And why? Because it’s not your kind of law!”

  “Dad, can we seriously be having this argument again?” Vicki asked, finally getting angry. “I should have a choice, don’t you think?”

  “Not when you have an obligation! To us, to me and your mother! And not when it can get you killed! If a choice is what you want, then you have it! And if you want to live like a pauper, then do!” Her father rose and gestured to her mother. “Look! Look at what you’re doing to her!”

  Vicki looked. Her mother’s glossy head bent slightly over her plate and her lips, their gloss finally worn off, pursed in pain. She was trying not to cry.

  “Mom, I’m sorry, don’t cry,” Vicki said, feeling a tug, not for the first time. Morty was dead, and now her mother was upset. It had all gone to hell in a handbasket. She didn’t want to quit. She didn’t think they were right. But she was so very tired. Suddenly the phone in the kitchen started ringing.

  “I’ll get that.” Her father rose and went into the other room, leaving them in miserable silence. Vicki knew that her mother was listening to the phone, to hear if it was a client; like most self-employed people, they worked around the clock. The two women sat in suspended animation until her father returned, his bearing erect, his features emotionless.

  “The phone’s for you, Victoria,” he said.

  “Me?” She rose stiffly, with a dog attached to her toe, which was when it struck Vicki that maybe her parents were herding her, in their own way. Biting her to keep her close. She knew that they loved her, and she loved them, too, despite their best efforts to the contrary.

  “Be right back,” she said, wondering who was on the phone.

  SIXTEEN

  “Vick, why is a black guy answering your cell? Are you cheating on me?”

  Dan. “I can’t talk now.”

  “What up? You said you’d call, and when you didn’t, I called your cell. What happened?”

  “It’s a long story.” Vicki could hear stone silence from the dining room. At least her mother wasn’t crying.

  “I e-mailed you, too. Didn’t you check your BlackBerry?”

  “I didn’t have a chance.”

  “Why does he have your phone? He doesn’t even know who you are. Did you get into trouble?”

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “That means yes. Are you okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine. You sound upset.”

  I am upset. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you staying overnight at your parents’?”

  “Are you insane?”

  Dan laughed. “When will you be home?”

  “An hour.”

  “Want me to come over? Mariella’s on call.”

  “No thanks.”

  “Then call me, no matter how late. I want to talk to you. I don’t like the way you sound. You’re worrying me lately, with Morty and all.”

  “Okay,” Vicki said, touched. The man could read her like a book. “Gotta go.”

  “No matter how late, call me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Swear?”

  “Swear.”

  “Okay, good-bye, sweetie.”

  She hung up, warm inside. Dan was truly worried about her. And he didn’t bite.

  Vicki got back to her house around ten o’clock, where she ignored her bills, mail, e-mail, and phone messages, and tiredly headed straight for the phone in her bedroom, shedding her coat on the way upstairs, dropping her purse, and kicking off her wounded shoe. She couldn’t wait to call Dan and tell him what had happened on Cater Street. He could help her sort it out. He’d been an AUSA so long, he’d have good ideas. Should they bust Mrs. Bristow’s dealer? Should they get her into rehab? And Vicki wa
nted to work on some theories with him, about Shayla Jackson and Bristow.

  She flicked on the lamplight beside her bed, slid out of her suit jacket and blouse, then slithered out of pantyhose and her skirt, feeling better once she was home. She loved her bedroom. She had painted the walls a bright cobalt blue last year, by herself, and she had a big TV/DVD player on a white metal stand affixed to the wall. Her dresser, next to the closet, was a pine four-drawer she’d bought secondhand, and the room was neat, clean, and comfy. She undressed, slipped into an old Harvard T-shirt, and tucked herself under her puffy white comforter while she called Dan.

  “Hello?” a woman answered, confusing Vicki for a second. Of course, it was Mariella. She recognized the slight British inflection. Then Vicki heard masculine laughter in the background. Dan.

  “Mariella, oh, hi. It’s Vicki.”

  “Vicki, hey, you caught us at a bad time. A very bad time.” There was more laughter, and Vicki realized that Mariella and Dan were in bed together. Dan was laughing, then Mariella started laughing. “No! No! Daniel, no tickling! Daniel!”

  Vicki felt a wave of shame, then didn’t know why. What was she ashamed of? That she was dying to talk to a married man? Yes, for starters. That he was at this moment making love to his wife? Yes, that too. That she would have traded beds in a minute? A trifecta!

  “Daniel! Don’t tickle!”

  “Mariella, sorry, I should go,” Vicki said, but Dan’s deep voice came on the line, breathless.

  “Vick, talk to you in the morning! Duty calls!”

  She was about to say good-bye, but Dan had already hung up.

  It left Vicki in her blue bedroom, alone except for the silence. She sat still for a minute, propped up by her pillows, trying to process what had just happened. Mariella must have taken a break and come home; she did that sometimes, at weird hours. Dan would have been delighted to see his wife, as he was for every drop of time she threw his way, as an afterthought or no.

  He adores her, you idiot. Right now they’re making love, five blocks away. GIVE IT UP, LOSER! YOU NEED A VIDEO?