His hand, resting flat on the folder, almost covered it. Outside of his physical presence, it was easy to forget how large the gods had framed him: big hands, big feet, long thick thigh bones, massive wrists.
“I have to depo this guy on the twenty-fourth. Right now, I have zero leverage.”
“How low can I go?” Birdwine asked, limbo style.
“Low as you like,” I said. “This is a straight-up BANK case.”
BANK was my acronym, and it stood for “both assholes, no kids.” BANKs were the best. They were lucrative, and I could fight as dirty as I liked without helpless teenagers or toddlers wandering into the crossfire. When there were kids, or if the client was a dear and tender soul, I had to move carefully, try to minimize the damage.
“Excellent,” Birdwine said. He liked low roads just fine, but he shared my soft spot for little pawns caught sideways in divorce. It was another reason we worked so well together. “What am I looking for?”
“Sex,” I said, with certainty.
Before I met Bryan Skopes, I knew just by looking at his file that he had more than earned the A in BANK. Sure, he was in the Rotary Club, and he served on the finance committee at his church. He made sure his aging father was well cared for. He no doubt thought of himself as a “good person.” Most people do.
But his first wife got no alimony and her child support was a pittance, though she was raising the two daughters he rarely saw. His second wife was fifteen years his junior. She’d worked for him as a receptionist, which further weighted the relationship. I didn’t see a “good person.” I saw a narcissist with a sex-and-power complex fueled by a genuine disdain for women.
Meeting Skopes in the flesh had both confirmed and lowered my opinion. The stealthy look I’d clocked him running over me—it wasn’t like a hungry man with empty pockets gazing at a buffet with no hope of more than a whiff. This had been the eye-flick of a sated gourmand, one who was getting well fed on the regular. That glance had been insulting, but not for having sex in it. It was insulting because he clearly felt entitled to it. He thought he had the upper hand in the negotiations, and that power differential turned him on more than my body. It made the righteous in his indignation ring false.
Our client was an asshole, too, no question. But even assholes deserve fair representation, especially when up against an equal and opposing asshole. In this case, I’d lucked into the lesser of two evils. Daphne was still evil, just lesser. Sure, Bryan Skopes thought of women as commodities, and sure, he had bought Daphne. But to be fair, she’d consented. I couldn’t respect her; I didn’t like her; it didn’t matter. So she had sold herself—well, I was her lawyer. My job was to make Skopes finish paying for her.
“You mean a mistress?” Birdwine asked.
I shook my head. “Don’t waste time hunting for a romantic meeting of true minds. Look lower—this guy has got the secret nasty oozing out his pores.”
This was how we worked together; I found the weak spots, then I pointed Birdwine straight at them and shot him. Together we had many more hits than misses. If I was right, and if Birdwine could catch him, Skopes would have to dial down the accusing, wounded tone and bring something much more substantial than a car title to the table.
“I’m on it. We done?” Birdwine asked.
“Yeah. Thanks, Birdwine,” I said.
“Please, call me Zachary.” He gave me the close-lipped version of his smile, bland and insincere.
“Heh, I see what you did there.” When he first started working for me, he’d told me only his ex-wife called him by his first name, and she’d remarried ten minutes after their divorce was final. These days she was living down in Florida, too busy squeezing out babies and pretending he was dead to call him anything. “I’ll stay out of your way.” I didn’t add, for now.
He got out. I drove off to get some dinner, my worries about Skopes v. Skopes already fading. If Birdwine stayed sober, then this problem was already solved.
I wasn’t sure he would stay sober, though. I became less sure as days passed with no word. Still, I stayed cool. Skopes and his lawyer, Jeremy Anderson, had been playing the delay game for months now. I could delay right back until Birdwine came through or until I found another way to break Skopes.
On February fourteenth, I stayed late researching a tricky precedent. By the time I finished, it was past eleven. I closed my computer down and got out my checkbook. I wrote Cash on the line that said Pay to the order of. My mother’s legal name was Karen Vauss, but I had no idea what name Kai was floating in her current incarnation. I signed the check and ripped it from the book.
I put it in an envelope from my personal stationery—plush cream-colored paper with Paula Vauss and the address of my midtown loft engraved in dark burnt brown. I scrawled Kai’s PO box number in Austin on the front and sealed it.
I sent her a check on the fifteenth of every month, both a ritual and my only form of communication with my mother for a decade and a half now.
It was my way of asking, Are we square yet?