“She was a dear friend,” said Velma Takahashi.

“Weekly visits and tears three years after the fact are not the acts of friendship. They are acts of something else. Love, perhaps. Or guilt.”

She looked at me, something dark and fierce in her eyes, and then she stepped away to the elevators. She punched the down button, crossed her arms, tapped a tidy toe, before stalking back to me.

“You had me followed.”

“But only out of a deep and abiding affection,” I said.

“Don’t forget your place, Mr. Carl. And be certain of one thing: Whatever you do, you will leave me out of it.”

The elevator doors opened. She reached out and sharply pinched my swollen jaw before marching off into the elevator, leaving me collapsed against the wall in pain.

It was the second time she had treated me like someone she had bought and paid for, someone whose sole purpose of existence was to serve her own mysterious ends. It was the second time she had treated me worse than a dog.

This was starting to be fun.

Mrs. Cullen now stood directly between the courtroom and me. She was a solid, pale woman with short white hair and navy shoes to match her stolid navy suit. Altogether formidable, and not looking too kindly at me as I made my way toward her. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about courtroom work, the gentle feelings of all the participants, one to the other.

And if you think divorce cases are tough, try murder.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Cullen,” I said slowly and clearly as I approached. “I know how difficult this is for you.”

“Do you now, Mr. Carl?”

“No, I suppose I can’t. Not really.”

“She was my youngest daughter, my last child. She came late, a gift from God.”

“We don’t mean any disrespect toward your daughter. We’re only trying to ensure that Mr. Dubé gets the fair trial he deserves.”

“He got everything he deserved, trust me on that, young man. And what did my daughter deserve?”

“She deserved better than she received,” I said.

“I saw you speaking to Velma Wykowski.”

“Wykowski, huh?”

“That was her name when she roamed about the city like a feral goat. What business could you have with a woman like her?”

“Whatever it is, it’s my business,” I said.

Mrs. Cullen let out a perfect middle-class humph. “She’s a molten one, isn’t she? Warming to look at, but dangerous to the touch. You know, she was with him first.”

“With whom?”

“Your client. But he wasn’t rich enough for her tastes, so the tramp tossed him and his toys to my Leesa.”

“Toys? What toys?”

“It’s not important. What is important is that she sent him my daughter’s way. I’ll never forgive her that.”

“Velma seems to have genuinely cared for your daughter.”

“Not enough to keep Leesa away from the French snake who became her husband. He’s a bad man, a charmer to be sure, but bad. A man can be a snake and a charmer both. He charmed my daughter, yes, but all the time I knew. I told her so, but Leesa wasn’t one to listen. So, against our best judgments, we gave him our daughter, and look what happened. I knew it, from the first. I could see the darkness in him.”

“And what does that look like, Mrs. Cullen,” I said, “the darkness in a man?”

She took a step closer, grabbed the fabric of my sleeve. “A flash of light where there should be none. Look in his left eye, Mr. Carl. It is there to be seen.”

“The flaw in his eye?”

“A sign.”

“But that doesn’t mean he murdered her.”

She let go of my arm, turned toward the courtroom door. “Maybe not, but it means he had it in him.”

Funny, I thought, that was exactly the way I felt about François Dubé, too. Except that wasn’t what he was on trial for. Sometimes I had to remind myself of why I ended up a criminal defense attorney. It wasn’t the money, really, because, truth be told, I wasn’t making enough, and it wasn’t because I believed that my clients were ultimately good souls wrongly accused, because generally they were neither good nor innocent, they were a bad lot, and François Dubé might just have been one of the worst. No, the root reason I was a criminal defense attorney was that I was always most comfortable on the side of the guy everybody else was against.

“You can be assured,” I said, “that Ms. Dalton, who will be prosecuting the case, is a highly competent trial attorney. If there is enough evidence to convict Mr. Dubé again, she will get it done. My job is just to make sure that the trial is fair.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. Carl. I know what your job is. Your job is to disseminate the perjuries he gives you, to make the truthful look false, to spread doubt like a farmer spreads manure.”

“We all need to have faith in the system, Mrs. Cullen.”

She lowered her head so that she was peering angrily at me from beneath her brow. “That’s not where my faith lies.”

There was something interesting in the malevolence she aimed at me just then. “If you can see darkness in François Dubé, what do you see when you look at me?”

She took a step forward, reached out a hand as if pulling a message from my soul. “I see something missing, is what I see.”

“Any idea what?”

“Well, for starters,” she said, a smile breaking out on her face, “a tooth.”

I gave her a small laugh, nodded, and started toward the door, but before I got past, she grabbed my arm again.

“He’s a charmer, like I said, and a snake, too, Mr. Carl. You should be on alert for who he’s charming now.”

It was sort of creepy, my hallway discussion with Mrs. Cullen, which might explain the strange image I carried in my head when I opened the door to the courtroom. In fact, I almost expected to see in the courtroom a giant cobra with a flaw in its eye, waving back and forth as it rose out of its basket, itself wearing the turban, itself playing the pipe, not itself subject to the beck of a charmer but looking to do some dark charming of its own.

What I saw instead was François Dubé, standing at the defense table, a sheriff with one hand on François’s shoulder, his other hand on François’s arm, about to step François back and take him off to prison. But François wasn’t looking at the sheriff, no. The sheriff was behind, and François was looking forward, directly into the eyes of my partner, Beth. He was holding her hands and gazing into her eyes, and speaking as calmly and softly as a hypnotist.

And my partner, Beth, God help her, was looking back and listening both and seeming to fall ever deeper under his spell.

21

I suppose at this point I need to recount the first of my visits to Dr. Bob. Remember I mentioned gratuitous violence?

“Uh-oh,” said Dr. Pfeffer cheerily as he peered into my mouth. “I see an abscess. And that’s not the bad news.”

With his hands still in my mouth, I replied, “Arruuuarrheearrgh.”

“It’s cracked, you see,” said Dr. Bob. “Your lower-right first molar. This one there.”

He gave it a tap with one of his instruments and I tried to kick out the fluorescent lights in the ceiling.

“It must have been the gun across your jaw that broke it. The crack is what’s causing the abscess, bacteria crawling like hungry spiders down the gap until they find a cozy home in your gums. I would love to save it, nothing I like better than a good endodontic procedure, but what can I do with a cracked root? Out it must come.” He gave a pickpocket’s giggle when he said this last part, delighted by the possibility of separating my tooth from my mouth. “Is that okay with you, Victor?”

“No chance to keep it?”

“On a chain around your neck, possibly,” said Dr. Bob, “but not in your mouth.”

“What about the gap?”

“Oh, we’ll take care of that, don’t you worry.”

“Too late.”

He pulled back, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses. “Do you want us to get another opinion? I could ask Tilda, but she usually agrees with me.”