Solomon And Lord Drop Anchor Part 17

She remembered, too. Crockett was the day-shift bouncer and occasional bartender, a ponytailed bodybuilder with a hot temper and delusions that he was the next Arnold Schwarzenegger. She'd moved in with him a week after the one-way journey south from Bodega Bay, and he'd gotten her the phony ID and the job at the Tiki Club. She gave Crockett her tips, but they were never enough to pay for his hash and steroids.

"Some guys I know are having a party tonight," he told her one day as she was leaving for the club.

"What guys?" she asked.

"Businessmen from out of town. They got a room at the Ramada by the airport."

"So you want to go?"

"Not me! Ain't my a.s.s they wanna see."

"I don't do private parties. Sheila told me-"

"Sheila don't know s.h.i.t. Who'd pay to see her saggy t.i.ts? This is four hundred plus tips."

Lisa was shaking her head when he grabbed her, his huge hands digging into the flesh of her upper arms. She tried to twist away, but he held on, pressing harder, slamming her into the wall but never letting go, using his size and strength just as her father had done to imprison her and break her will.

"I put a roof over your head," Crockett said. "I get you a job. I protect your a.s.s from guys who'd slice you up and eat you for breakfast. You f.u.c.king owe me!"

Thinking back now, here it was again.

Max, Crockett, dear old Dad. How many men do I owe?

She went to the motel that night, carrying a boom box, getting paid up front, then stripping for three drunken salesmen, all the time palming a miniature can of Mace, a trick Sheila had taught her. One of the sc.u.mbags, a paunchy forty-five-year-old wearing a wedding band, lunged for her. She sidestepped him, and when the other two tried to tackle her, she sprayed one squarely in his open, dumb mouth and kneed the other in the groin, a direct shot that sent him tumbling to the floor, vomiting.

The first man took a wild swing at her and missed. Lisa turned to run for the door, but he tripped her, then dragged her to the floor, clawing at her thong, drawing blood from her hip with his fingernails. He was about her father's age, and those memories, so fresh then, came racing back, filling her with fear. She had vowed it would never happen again.

I'd kill a man before I'd let him ...

She was on her back with the man above her when she worked an arm free and hit him with a blast of the Mace. He howled and toppled backward, his hands tearing at his eyes. Lisa scrambled to her feet, picked up a table lamp, and bashed it across his forehead, quieting him. Adrenaline pumping, she made it out of the motel room with her backpack and money but left the boom box behind.

"Dumb b.i.t.c.h!" Crockett yelled when she got home, backhanding her across the face, cursing her a second time when he counted the money, discovering the roll of bills was really a single twenty on top with nineteen two-dollar bills underneath. "Stupid jailbait b.i.t.c.h!"

Three nights later, Max Wanaker rode up to the Tiki on his white horse or was it a white limo? Whatever his flaws, Lisa now knew he had rescued her. She had been one step away from the streets. c.o.c.ktail waitress, stripper ... hooker was not far behind. Max seemed to know everything in those days. He saw right through the Dermablend makeup she used to cover the bruises.

"Who did this to you?" he had asked.

"My boyfriend, but he didn't mean to hurt me."

"Where can I find him?" Max asked.

Even now, she could remember his voice. Grim and determined.

Where can I find him?

It would be that simple. No further explanation needed. She knew Max wouldn't do it himself. The soft hands and manicured nails did not belong to a thug. But he knew people, had dealt with the Teamsters. In Max's world, everything could be arranged. She saw the bartender only once more. He was trying to get up Russian Hill on crutches.

Yes, Max, I owe you, but maybe that makes me resent you even more.

"Sometimes you really p.i.s.s me off," she said.

"I'm sorry," he said, backing off, sounding sincere. "You know how I feel about you ..."

How? Say it!

How many times had he said the three magic words? Twice, she recalled, once after too much champagne and once when he thought he'd lost her.

In fact, you did lose me, Max. I was tired of sneaking in and out of hotels.

She had just started law school and felt like she was getting somewhere. So why was she stuck in this nowhere relationship? She wanted her independence, and Max was surprisingly understanding. He gave her time and s.p.a.ce. He was secure enough to let her go, telling her he hoped she would return.

It was the best time of her life. She found Tony Kingston, or rather, he had found her. Discovered the baby-sitter had grown up. Lisa had taken care of Greg, Tony's son, since she was twelve, helping around the house, admiring the photos of the handsome naval aviator in his spiffy flightsuit. Tony had never been married, and when the child's mother-Tony's teenage girlfriend-took off, he was left with a son to raise. Lisa remembered her adolescent excitement when Tony came home on leave, duffel bag slung over a shoulder.

So strong and decent, so unlike my own father.

She learned enough psychology to know Tony was the father she had never had. But he was so much more, too. Tony didn't rescue her as Max had done; he treated her as an equal, something Max never did. Tony was everything. And then, suddenly, he was gone.

Just as Max had hoped, she came back. He told her she had changed, that he liked the old Lisa better. The old Lisa is dead, she said. He didn't ask who she had been with, and she never told. The past and the future both remained unspoken.

Now, pacing in the apartment overlooking the park, he said, "I'd leave Jill for you in a second if you'd ask me to ..."

She let the bait dangle. Ten years ago, she prayed to hear those words. Now, they left her confused and troubled.

"G.o.d, Lisa, I love you. I always have."

Whoa! What did he say? And why now?

"Do you love me, Max, or do you just need me more?"

"When the case is over, I'm going to ask Jill for a divorce and we can get married."

"Max, please ..."

"Okay, I won't pressure you. But you're right about one thing. I need your help. I wouldn't ask if I didn't. h.e.l.l, I'm begging you. This is even more important than you know."

"Tell me."

"I can't. Not now."

She thought about it. Hard as it was for Max to say it, he did love her. She never doubted it. And he had helped her when no one else cared whether she slept under a bridge or went hungry. Now he was asking her to choose between him and some flowery notions of right and wrong.

No one would ever know. It was just one case.

But what about her beliefs? What about the new, improved Lisa Fremont, to use Max's mocking phrase? Could she put her new ideals on the shelf just this once? And how deeply did she believe them anyway?

The marble statues and bronze doors notwithstanding, justice was an ethereal concept, a divine ideal, which like sainthood was rarely seen on earth. Justice was the pearl in the oyster. Keep on shuckin' and good luck huntin'. Despite the lofty notions she'd learned from the law books, her views were shaped by her own experiences. Weren't everyone's? What was it Justice Cardozo had said? "Try as we might, we can never see with any eyes except our own."

And what my eyes have seen.

Now, after four years at Berkeley, summa c.u.m laude-thank you very much-three years at Stanford Law, magna c.u.m laude with a prize-winning law review note, and one year clerking for a federal court of appeals judge in the D.C. Circuit, she had all the credentials. So why did she consider herself a fraud?

She wanted to believe, but d.a.m.nit, Max had pressed the right b.u.t.tons. She was a priest without faith, a pagan inside the holy tabernacle. To Lisa Fremont, the law was not majestic. The slogan carved into the pediment-equal justice under law-was a benediction for the Kodak-toting tourists. The law was as cold as the marble of its sanctuary.

Disregarding the lofty symbols and images, she thought of the legal system as a dingy factory with leaking boilers, broken sprockets, and rusted cogs. The law was bought and sold, swapped and hocked, bartered and auctioned, just like wheat, widgets ... and girls who run away from home.

In the upcoming term, she knew the Court would be asked to consider nearly seven thousand cases but would issue fewer than one hundred rulings. Law clerks, whose first function was to summarize and a.n.a.lyze the pet.i.tions seeking review, frequently complained about the workload. No problem, Lisa thought.

If I get the job, I'll read them all. I'll plow through the research, draft the justice's opinions, and make his coffee, if that's what he wants me to do.

She'd know the legislative history of the statutes and the precedential value of the cases. She'd master the procedure and the substantive law. She'd write pithy footnotes and trace the source of a law back to Hammurabi. She'd prepare incisive pool memos for the judicial conferences and brilliant bench memos for her boss. She'd stay up all night with the death clerk on execution stays, and she'd be at work at 8 A.M. sharp.

She'd be prepared to search for the truth, to do justice.

She'd do all of those things in every case ... except one.

The case of Laubach v. Atlantica Airlines, Inc., would be different. She already had read the file. She knew the issues and the arguments on both sides. Even more important, she knew who had to win.

"I'll do it, Max. I'll do it for you."

"Great! I knew you wouldn't let me down." The tension drained from him, and he smiled triumphantly. "We make a great team, Lisa.

When your clerkship's up, you should come into the airline's legal department. Pete Flaherty's going to retire in a couple of years. How would you like to be general counsel?"

"Max, please stop planning my life. Let's just get through this."

"Whatever you say, darling."

His smile was still in place. He had done it. And he hadn't even used his trump card: the truth. If Lisa knew that his life was tethered to such a slender thread, she would have rushed to help him. But this way was better.

She's doing it for love, not pity.

Max felt invigorated. Oh, there was much more to be done. She had to get the job, and she had to convince her judge-the swing vote, according to Flaherty-to go their way. But he had great confidence in Lisa. He would trust her with anything, a thought that made him smile, for he was doing just that. He was trusting her with his life.

Late that night, lying in bed, staring at the liquid numbers of the digital clock melting into the enveloping darkness, as she listened to Max snoring alongside her, Lisa confronted the stark, bleak truth. Yes, she would do what Max had asked. Not because she loved him, for at this point, she didn't know what she felt. Not because she owed him, because that was never part of the bargain.

She would do it because her loyalty to Max outweighed her newfound principles. Max had been right all along.

She didn't believe in the words carved into stone.

Her soul was as barren as his, her heart as icy.

Deep inside, she was just like him.

NTSB FAILS TO FIND CAUSE OF CRASH.

WASHINGTON D.C.-(AP) The National Transportation Safety Board announced yesterday that it could not conclusively determine the cause of the crash of Atlantica Airlines Flight 640, which claimed the lives of 288 persons in a fiery crash in the Florida Everglades in December 1995.

Citing contradictory evidence and the failure to recover all the essential parts, the NTSB said in a lengthy report that it could not state with certainty what caused the aircraft to lose its hydraulic systems on approach to Miami International Airport. However, Board Chairman Miles McGrane pointedly stated that there was "substantial evidence" to support the widely held belief that a bomb was detonated inside the tail-mounted engine of the DC-10, causing engine fragments to sever the hydraulic lines.

"Traces of PETN were recovered from the nacelle of the number two engine, but many of the engine parts, including the stage one rotor fan disk, were not found," McGrane said. "Presumably, they are buried in the muck of the Everglades and will never be recovered. Without these parts, we cannot perform the metallurgical tests needed to reach a definitive conclusion."

PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, is a component of plastic explosives. McGrane added that there was no evidence of pilot error or mechanical failure, other than loss of flight controls, which followed the apparent explosion in the number two engine.

Pressed by reporters, McGrane expressed frustration with the months of delays and endless speculation about the cause of the crash. On the day of the accident, armed U.S. Navy jets were conducting flights from the Key West Naval Air Station. He discounted the theory that a ground-to-air missile or an errant heat-seeking missile from a military jet downed the aircraft. None of the jets reported firing a missile.

Two weeks prior to the crash, a Cuban exile group in Miami threatened violent reprisals against Atlantica Airlines which, through a foreign subsidiary, had begun charter flights from Mexico City to Havana. Two members of the group, La Brigada de la Libertad, were arrested for allegedly spraypainting anti-Castro slogans on the fuselage of an Atlantica aircraft after climbing a fence to gain access to a hangar at the Miami airport. The group vigorously denied all responsibility for the crash of the New York-to-Miami flight.

CHAPTER 2.

The Junior Justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES JR. SAT HERE. Oh, not in this chair. Not even in this building, if we're being tediously literal about it, Sam Truitt thought.

But Holmes sat here, at the far end of the bench, to the chief justice's left, when he was the junior justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

So what the h.e.l.l am I doing in old Ollie's chair?

Which was also, at various times, figuratively at least, the chair of Brandeis, Cardozo, Black, Frankfurter, and Brennan. Giants of jurisprudence whose thundering p.r.o.nouncements were engraved in stone for the ages. Men of soaring intellect and towering integrity.

How will I even begin to measure up?

It was a rare moment of insecurity for Sam Truitt, who frequently was described as egotistical and vain, even by his friends. His enemies called him a left-wing, Ivy League intellectual sn.o.b who was out of touch with the real world. But friends and enemies alike agreed that he was brilliant and eloquent. His opponents feared that eventually, with a long enough tenure, he would be worth two or three votes on the Court, using his superior intellect and persuasive skills to sway others.

At the moment, though, Truitt wasn't capable of persuading cats to chase mice. Deep in a crisis of confidence, drowning in waves of self-doubt, he was an imposter, a graffiti artist in the Louvre, a trespa.s.ser in a shrine.

Though he was a broad-shouldered man, over six feet and two hundred pounds, a former athlete still fit at forty-six, at the moment, he felt he was a dwarf in the imposing, marble-columned courtroom.

Sam Truitt still had not recovered from the confirmation process. Looking back now, the stinging vitriol of the personal attacks had caught him by surprise. On CNN and before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Republicans hauled out their hatchet men, and the sound bites dug deep wounds. He remembered his discomfort at being grilled by Senator Thornton Blair of South Carolina, mouthpiece for the right-wing Family Values Foundation.

"So if ah git this right, Per-fessor Truitt," Blair droned, waving a fistful of Truitt's Harvard Law Review articles on civil liberties, "you'd hire gay teachers but ban the Bible in our schools. You'd give away condoms to our innocent children and take away guns from our law-abiding citizens. You'd have federal marshals protect baby-killing abortionists but leave the public defenseless against rapists and murderers. Does that about sum it up, Per-fessor?"

"That's a fallacious representation of my views," Truitt said, sweating under the lights, sounding uptight and uncool, even to himself.

"Fal-la-cious, is it?" the senator asked rhetorically, making the word sound obscene. "When's the last time you attended church, Per-fessor?"

"I don't see the relevance of that," Truitt said, backpedaling, trying to keep his feet on a rolling log in a treacherous river.