Shorts - Sinister Shorts (10 page)

“It's in the fireplace, above the flue. Get it yourself.”

He made her walk into the small living room with him. He could hear the TV through the kids' door. “Is this all?”

“All except the back bills I paid. Are you going to tell on me? If you do, I'll just go on over the falls like he did.”

“No. I'm not going to tell.”

She stood in the doorway, glaring as he drove away. “Good-bye, then, you cold bastard,” she yelled after him.

***

When he came to the bridge, where he needed to take a left to go into Timberlake, he took a right instead, and drove to the county airport, his right hand caressing the sooty bag. The Southwest Airlines plane bound for San Francisco was circling above, preparing to land. Through the open car windows, rustles and rushings and sighs drifted in on the wind.

He went into the dark airport bar and sat at a small candlelit table overlooking the runway. He placed the bag carefully on the table. “Drink?” the waitress said.

“A double Jack Daniel's, straight up.”

He picked it up, savored the fumes-

Liquor, money, blurry romance, some faraway place-all he had to do was drink it down, have another, buy a ticket, and drop a postcard in the mailbox resigning as deputy sheriff-

“It's such a beautiful night, isn't it?” the waitress said. “I guess you're not ready for another.”

Two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars-

But it was dead money. He'd be alone like Valerie, resurrecting that presence in the back of his mind that made him drink-

He wasn't completely finished. He wasn't extinguished like Valerie; he could still love somebody. She had taught him that by making a fool out of him.

He was looking down at the table, staring at the little flame guttering in its holder. “Even the candlelight hurts tonight,” he said. His voice sounded husky and strange.

She leaned down, put her hands on the table as she looked at the candle. “Blow it out, then, honey,” she said. “Then the moonlight can come in from outside.” She had a strong definite tone of voice and hair sprayed to stand firm against anything.

“You can take this drink away,” he said.

“You're not going to have it?” Surprise lit her face.

“Not this time.”

“Where you headed?” she said curiously. “ San Francisco?”

“Not this time,” he said again. As he climbed back into the patrol car and headed back to Timberlake, he glanced out the window.

Outside, the plane was landing, its red lights twinkling off the wet tarmac in the soft haze of evening.

O'Shay's Special Case

After they finished some initial paperwork, the interview proceeded in the usual fashion, starting with facts, ending up with emotional content, but something about the client made Patrick O'Shay uncomfortable, and it took a lot to shake him after all his years in the business. “You say you have good coverage?” O'Shay asked.

“Thirty years I've been their slave.” Jeff Colby worked for Dunkirk Enterprises, a construction company that specialized in huge real estate developments. “Typical profit-driven corporation,” he said, voice full of loathing. “Nobody gives a damn how the job gets done, long as it's done. I take the blame if anything upsets their damn schedule.”

“You feel you aren't treated well?”

“Nothing to do with feeling,” he said, angry. He looked around the rumpled, file-filled space, possibly wishing for something slicker. O'Shay's office didn't intimidate; its comfortable shabbiness welcomed workers from the farms ringing Salinas and the central valley. “They treat me worse than dirt.”

O'Shay sat back in his chair. A big man with deep-set, piercing blue eyes women loved and men found scary or trustworthy, depending upon their personalities, he was larger than life, inches over six feet and well over the recommended healthy weight for a man his size, although much of it was sheer muscle. “Tell me about your injury.”

And the litany began. Colby had worked there first the summer after high school. He had hammered flooring, Sheetrocked, dug dirt, painted exteriors, framed foundations, poured cement-he had done it all. He had built sprawling, spanking-new suburban houses for so long he had accumulated a million indignities, all of which he unloaded on O'Shay-along with resentment that ran so deep in him that his skin burned red as he talked.

“Since I was seventeen, I worked,” he said. “I started at the bottom. I did what you might call shit work, what nobody else wanted to do, and always slapped a smile on my face while I was at it.

“My wife and me live in a cottage built in 1923 and looking even older than that. That's what we can afford. Every day, I was putting in new sinks, flagstone pathways, fountains, all for other people.” He almost spat with outrage. “We don't even have a dishwasher.”

“We need to pinpoint when the pain began,” said O'Shay.

But Colby had been saving up for this moment, and he wasn't squandering it by going straight to the point. “Time went on, they put me in charge of a crew. Didn't pay much more, but it was better telling other guys what to do, drinking coffee, not coming home too sweaty to touch my kids. Then one day they go, ‘Sorry. The guys are complaining.' Well, yeah. I worked ' em hard. Nobody got away with nothing. Hell, I knew all the tricks to avoid working too hard. Bastards claimed I lacked people skills.” His laugh was ragged, angry. “They demoted me. I'm strong, always have been. But I'm forty-seven now and haven't done heavy labor for years. Those jobs are for younger guys and they know it. I think they forced me into that position thinking they could get rid of me once and for all. That I'd quit.”

Something in Colby's eyes disturbed O'Shay. He looked in them and saw ponds full of scum, rough debris, hidden dangers.

Wide shoulders stretched the dress shirt Colby wore. “So last summer, August, I think, I was loading furniture from a truck for a model home. Even here in the valley, it can get hot. I bet it was ninety in the shade. Imports from Thailand, I think. Mostly, these designers pick lightweight stuff for these homes, keep them looking light and airy for buyers by using a lot of bamboo and cane but there was this armoire, a mahogany piece as heavy as a piano. Me and another guy were angling it through a narrow doorway and I heard this cracking sound like something rotten gave. My back hurt like a son of a bitch right away.”

O'Shay had watched for signs of injury when the man entered his office. Colby had sat down easily, not lowering himself with the exquisite care of a man with a herniated disk or other nerve problem. His eyes looked clear and unbothered, not shadowed by pain, and nothing he did favored his back. “This man, your coworker, would he be willing to tell us about that day?”

“He's gone. Illegal, probably. Didn't speak much English. He split at Christmas for El Salvador or somewhere.”

“Ah.”

“I can't stand fully upright anymore,” Colby said, “because I hurt so bad. I can't lift anything heavy. I can't do my job anymore. I can't even make love to my wife, although I'm not sure I want you to tell the court about that.”

O'Shay made a note. “I want to know anything relevant,” he said. “What makes you remark on that?”

“Well, you know. Positions. I can't do all the acrobatics I used to.” He snickered and crossed his leg with a graceful hoisting of muscled thigh.

O'Shay nodded.

“I heard you've been in business forever. Heard you go to bat for the little guy,” Colby said.

“Twenty years in business. We have a lot of farmworker clients.” And, oh, those people really suffered.

“I guess they get hurt sometimes, too.”

“Sure,” O'Shay said, scribbling notes, noting down the dozen vague problems Colby now went on to describe as unbearable.

“You say you don't get along with other employees.”

“Buncha critics and complainers,” Colby said. “When I do something right, there's people lining up to take credit.” He had a mean line for a mouth.

“You've seen a doctor?”

“Several.” Colby slapped a bundle of medical records down on O'Shay's desk. “I got one will swear I oughtta be dead.”

According to their usual arrangement, Rosa knocked after twenty minutes had elapsed, and without waiting for a reply, entered the room. “Emilio Lopez on line one,” she said urgently.

“Ah, thanks.” O'Shay turned to Colby. “I have to take this. Let's talk again tomorrow morning. I need a list of all the physicians you've consulted and all the treatments you've had. Rosa, get the usual permissions signed by Mr. Colby before he goes so we can access his records, okay?”

“That guy,” Rosa said after getting the forms signed and seeing the man out. She handed O'Shay a file that needed attention. “Another gray morning.”

She talked that way, poetically. What she meant was, Colby was a loser.

“Should I dump these papers now or is he one of the unstable ones who needs to be let down easy?”

“Keep the papers. We're taking the case.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Nudging a loose pile of folders on his desk into order, Rosa said, “You're kidding, right? That guy could bench-press four hundred pounds without breaking a sweat!”

O'Shay shrugged.

Rosa put a hand on her hip. “He couldn't even keep a limp going all the way out the door. He was practically dancing the cha-cha out there, and you know why? Because he's lined up the best worker's comp attorney in Salinas. And why are you considered the best? In all these years, you've never taken a client who was blatantly faking. Everybody knows that and respects you for it. So what's going on?”

O'Shay didn't answer.

“Is this to do with your retirement? Are you worrying about that? Does his case mean big money?”

“Not likely, although that would be my wish.”

His secretary stared at him, head at an angle, like a bird focusing on crumbs through a single sharp eye, hoping to see him better. “Then, don't do this,” she said. “You don't take guys like him, a sleazebag. A phony. A greedhead.”

“ Rosa,” he said, “open a new file.”

She flounced out, leaving her perfume and disgust behind in equal measure.

In spite of the optimistic sounds the lawyer had made, Jeff Colby had seen the doubt in O'Shay's eyes. The man didn't believe him. Fair enough, Colby thought. He didn't believe O'Shay as far as he could toss him. So, he worked on Plan B. He could not, would not, go back to that soul-sucking job. He knew a lawsuit was a long shot, so plan for the short shot.

***

O'Shay spoke with Colby's doctor, the one who agreed to swear about Colby's on-the-job injury. He knew the man's reputation locally. Rampantly pro-worker and antiestablishment, the doctor nevertheless had a smooth professional manner, an excellent education, a thriving practice, and knew the right noises to make. What better could O'Shay hope for? Colby's doctor asked straight out exactly what O'Shay needed said to win his case. O'Shay gave him the details he wanted parroted back, anticipating the report to come, which would be shamelessly hyperbolized.

The doctor had friends also willing to swear for a price.

Further sinking below the mud line, O'Shay asked his old law school roommate out for lunch and plied him with flavored martinis, picking his brain.

“How you win a case that's unwinnable,” Chuck said, sipping the cranberry-flavored concoction that was sure to send him heaving into the toilet bowl later, “is to invoke the everyman. Does your client qualify?”

“I guess. He has a wife and kids. He's worked all his life without getting fired even once.”

His buddy shook his head. “No, no, no. Question is, does he look the part? Can he play an injury or not? And is he worthy?”

“What?”

“He has to get up there on the stand in a starched white shirt, slightly frayed, like he's making such an effort to look good but it's so hard. He has to speak English well, so we know he's not an idiot or some illegal just trying to finagle money out of the system. He should have bags under his eyes. Ditto for the wife and kids, if you can get them in there with you. He needs to show pain, and he needs to make that judge believe he hurts. He needs to look like a strong man knocked flat by the nefarious actions of his employer. He needs to look reduced from a major player to a husk. But you know all this already. You say he's white?”

“Yeah. Born in Oakland.”

“Excellent. No offense to all those boys you usually represent, but nobody kicks in big bucks to the Mexicans.”

Chuck read O'Shay's face, and shook his head. “O'Shay, O'Shay. Forget the liberal politics. Get real.” He ordered another drink, this time vodka with orange juice, and nibbled on stale nuts. “Bottom line, you got a good thing going with this guy. I looked it up before I came today. His company takes care of their own. He's a movie star compared to your usual clientele, and he's got the backing of a major studio. Line up your experts. Practice with him until he's got the role nailed.”

“You never asked me about his injury.”

His pal, flirting with a girl at the end of the bar, waved at the bartender. “Isn't that kinda like asking a murderer if he done it? That's not the way of our people, O'Shay.”

O'Shay paid for the drinks.

When he inclined toward optimism, which wasn't often, Jeff Colby indulged in fantasies about the family farm he would buy, maybe in the Caribbean, proving once and for all he was no loser. He would coddle his wife with cheap servants, get his kids into a school where they didn't know what gangbanging was, where they would learn to sail after school. Twirling the wheel of his Chevy Nova at a stoplight on Main, right before making a left, he indulged in a fantasy where he came to work and announced his swift exit. All the assholes he hated would be envious. He would prove he was somebody and not just the pathetic, powerless nobody they had made him into.

Back at the rental house on Blanco, he kissed Sandra, then took out his gun, loaded it, and went into the backyard, where the light was fading. He propped cans on the fence, glad as always that their small yard rose up steeply and was bordered by farmland, and shot, and shot, and shot, misses plunking into the dirt behind his targets.