“What do you think I should do?”

“You have no choice,” she said. “Go after the bastard. Screw him to the wall. You sure have enough to work with.”

And she was right about that. There was the lying, the criminal investigation, the currying of favor with the prosecution, his general all-purpose sleaziness. It wouldn’t be hard to split his festering carcass on the stand. I had the material, I had the wherewithal, and believe you me, there was nothing I wanted more. I had been waiting for this opportunity since high school. Destroying him would be as easy as stomping on a roach, and twice as much fun. I stood and stepped to the lectern and stepped back and stepped forward again. I was like a shark getting ready to attack. My blood was up, chum was in the water, an old high-school chum. I was ready.

But there was something in Dalton’s smile, something in the unconcern with which Sonenshein sat in the witness stand, something about what the bartender at his club had said, something about a flower in a vase.

I shook my head and tried to dismiss it all. He was there, on the stand, with a bull’s-eye on his chest. Impossible to resist. I leaned forward, pointed my finger, opened my mouth and…

And it came to me again. The image of a single flower in a narrow vase.

I couldn’t place it, the image. I turned my head, looked again at Dalton. She was watching me with more than her usual interest, she was watching me as if I were some sort of specious jewel that she was trying to appraise. And I remembered the wink she gave me after my closing, the wink that had sent chills down my spine.

“Mr. Carl?” said Judge Armstrong. “We’re waiting.”

I nodded, leaned forward on the lectern, tapped it once, twice, turned once more to look at Dalton and then at Beth, her face twisted in anticipation, and at François, his own face creased with worry. They were waiting for me. They were all waiting for me, waiting for me to rush forward and tear this bastard apart.

“Mr. Carl?” said the judge.

“Your Honor,” I said, biting my cheek in frustration all the while, “the defense has no questions for this witness.”

55

I was in my car, driving and stewing, accompanied by the raging of my anger. I had been lied to, I had been used and abused, I had been manipulated like a monkey. It had all been a fabrication, the whole violent affair between a dead woman and a mysterious motorcycle maniac named Clem, a figment of one person’s twisted imagination.

And I had bought it.

That’s what got to me the worst, not that I had been lied to – I’m a lawyer, everybody lies to me; lying to the lawyers is the true national pastime, as American as baseball and cheating on your wife – but that I hadn’t sussed out the lie. And it’s not like there weren’t enough clues. The overly dramatic visits to the grave site by Velma Takahashi. The way I forced the story of Clem out of that bastard Sonenshein with my way-too-clever threat of Japanese gangsters. The manner of Velma Takahashi, going through the motions during our confrontation about the mystery man. And what had she said of him? He is nothing. He’s nowhere. He’s a phantom.

Sometimes I almost think I’m clever, and then reality spits a glob of humiliation in my face.

I realized it all while staring at Jerry Sonenshein on the witness stand. And still I thought of going after him, of showing him to be a liar and continuing with the Clem defense. The believable lie is often the best approach in court. Where would lawyers be if all we had to work with was the truth? But the strange image that kept coming back to me, the image of the flower in the vase, convinced me otherwise. Even one question to that bastard would have been one question too many. So I declined our cross-examination. And as the spectators let out a collective gasp, I stormed out of the courtroom without another word, leaving it for Beth to clean up the mess.

And now I was in my car, driving and stewing. Stewing and driving. But I wasn’t just driving hither and thither, without a plan. I knew where I was headed. It was a Thursday afternoon, and I was going to the manicurist.

The joint was posh, with a long maroon awning fronting the entrance, with blue and gray velvet curtains and fresh flowers artfully arranged in the waiting room, with a marble floor and a woman sitting behind the appointment desk so pale and so cold she might as well have been made of porcelain. Her face cracked a little when she saw me charge through the front door.

“Helloo,” she said. “Do we have an appointment?”

“No,” I said as I moved right past her. “We don’t.”

“Sir, you have to-”

“I can’t wait,” I said, showing her the back of my hand, wiggling my fingers. “It’s a cuticle emergency.”

She recoiled in horror at the sight of my nails, which gave me enough time to slip through the doorway and into the salon proper. There were a series of workstations on either side of a hallway, each curtained off for privacy. I moved through the salon with an abiding sense of purpose, flicking open the curtains to check who was being worked on, eliciting a series of shrieks as I made my way toward the rear. And then I found her, swathed in a thick white robe, a towel around her head, leaning back in a lounge chair, being fussed over, literally, hand and foot.

“Why did you do it?” I said.

“Have you come for a pedicure, Victor?” said Velma Takahashi as the two slim woman working on her nails turned their faces toward me. “Minh here has such a deft touch. It is so relaxing.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what? Choose this color polish? I thought it matched my eyes. You don’t think it matches my eyes?”

Just then the receptionist came up from behind me, holding a nail file like a knife. “I tried to stop him, Mrs. Takahashi,” she said.

Seeing the situation, one of the seated women grabbed a pair of scissors and held it high, as if she were about to stab me in the kneecap.

“It’s okay, dears,” said Velma to the women. “He works for me, though I do think after this I’m going to have to let him go.” The receptionist retreated, the manicurists went back to work.

“Why did you set up François?” I said, still standing before her as the women filed and painted and buffed.

“I would never set up François.”

“But it sure seems like it. I’ve been trying to figure it out, and I can’t. Do you hate him so much you were you trying to torture him further, providing him false hope and then manipulating his defense attorney into relying on a premise so easily shown to be false?”

“Tell me what happened, Victor.”

“Your buddy Sunshine spilled it all to the D.A. The way you convinced him to tell his cock-and-bull story about Clem and Leesa, the way he duped me into believing it.”

Her mouth twitched and then regained its normal artificial poutiness. “He’s a pathetic liar.”

“Yes, he is,” I said. “But this time he’s telling the truth. And now François is screwed, and I’ve been played for the fool.”

“Your natural position. I guess you won’t anymore be needing me to testify.”

“Why, Velma? That’s what I want to know.”

“Have you ever regretted anything in your life, Victor?”

“Only everything.”

“So you know the way it seeps through your bones like an acid. Drip, drip, drip.”

“But what is it you regret? A life wasted in the pursuit of someone else’s money?”

“Is that a waste?”

“The series of surgeries that turned you into a Kewpie doll?”

“I thought you liked the result.”

“Or do you regret killing Leesa Dubé?”

“Oh, Victor, you’ve come unhinged.”

“Have I? You say you didn’t try to set up François, so maybe you were actually trying to help him and botched it. But then the question is why? Why help that slimy son of a bitch? The answer might be in the visits to the grave site, the guilt in your eyes. Why would you concoct this lie except to make some amends? Did you kill her, Velma?”