States of Grace Read online

  “Speaking of girls, the blonde on the news says a storm’s comin’ our way.”

  My throat constricts. “Hopefully, it’s just another fire drill.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” he says, his Ts sounding like Ds and the look on his face proof that we’ve been through this routine one too many times. “That last one, whatever that bi—” Vinnie pauses. “Whatever that old gal was called, she ripped off half my roof tiles. Place looked like a kid with a bad haircut.”

  It is amusing to watch the hurricane media circus on TV—supermarkets running out of bottled water and batteries; videos of chichi types, for whom canned food is usually an anathema, piling shopping carts full of the stuff; and my favorite, the “cone of opportunity,” the megaphone-shaped impact zone with a mind of its own. But the truth is, storms—all loud noises for that matter—still petrify me, transport me straight back to that day in Fallujah, as if I never made it out of the Humvee.

  “Ophelia’s the name,” he says.

  “What?”

  “The storm. They’re calling it Tropical Storm Ophelia.” He shakes his head hard from side to side. “Have you heard a word I said?”

  I head for the recycle bins outside the office, anxious to distract myself, to do something with my hands, my head a riot of the incoming storm and questions about what I might have done to walk a guilty man.

  I did everything I could to defend him, sure. But it’s my role in the play. Right?

  I just thought the jurors would do their part and see through his lies.

  “Let’s get these sorted,” I say, slamming cans and bottles into bins. “They can call the storm whatever they want, just wake me when it’s over. Who makes up these names anyway? Didn’t Ophelia drown?”

  Vinnie takes a step back. “What’s got you all bent out of shape?”

  “Nothing.”

  He rolls his eyes. “Right. Nothin’. That’s what my second ex-wife used to say right before she smacked me upside the head.” He kneels beside me. “What happened today, kid?”

  “I won a case.”

  He claps me on the back. “Congratulations. Winning’s supposed to be good, ain’t it?”

  “So I’ve been told. But winning’s not always right, remember?”

  His eyes harden and we revert to sorting in silence.

  Three wasted years are a lot to a man like Vinnie, on the back nine of his life, and I share his anger at the injustice, not to mention the guilt I carry for my part in it. In another lifetime, I prosecuted Vinnie for knifing a man to death in The Hell Hole, a biker bar on Second Street, back when Vinnie had enemies. The jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. A year later, as part of a police corruption probe, I discovered a trio of crooked cops had conspired to bury an eyewitness who would have testified Vinnie had been thirty miles away betting on the greyhounds at the Biscayne dog track when the hit went down. It took me two years to make things right, but I did. Fought all the way to the Florida Supreme Court and convinced the Court Vinnie had been railroaded. As a result, I became Enemy Number One of the local cops. The battle cost me my job, not to mention my freedom, for a time.

  When Vinnie got off death row, he thought he owed me. Not long after, when I was unemployed, broke, and living out of a rust-bucket car parked in a different lot every night, he set about repaying me by giving me a place to stay. He’d bought The Hurricane with the settlement money he got from a lawsuit I brought against the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Vinnie may be old school mob all the way—cops are crooked, rats deserve whacking, and only family can be trusted—but I appreciate his counting me as family, as well as his company. I keep telling him he better start taking my money for rent or I’ll move out, but he won’t hear of it. “Family don’t pay.”

  The rhythm of working side by side frees my mind. Watching Vinnie sort each item into the proper bin, I am struck by how many lives one person can live, how many faces we have to show to the world. While Vinnie might wear his hard life on the streets and two long bits in prison in the tight set of his jaw and steely stare, his jailhouse tattoos have faded along with too many scars to count, and he’s become a good man. He keeps the safety on his gun and the beat cops’ cell phone numbers on speed dial. He goes to City Commission meetings and pays his taxes early. Like me, Vinnie doesn’t want any more trouble, but he can still smell it a mile away.

  Task complete, he extends a hand to help me stand, Oscar, my prosthetic leg, not being the most flexible of limbs. “How’s about we have some chow, kid?”

  “Thanks, but I’m tired.”

  “You sure?” he asks, as we haul the last of the recycle bins to the curb. He worries I don’t eat enough. He’s constantly plying me with his home-made manicotti or corned beef and cabbage, legacies from a Sicilian father and an Irish mother.

  “I’ll grab a snack upstairs.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Your loss, kid. But thanks _for the help, even if I said I didn’t need it.”

  “Thanks for the company,” I say, heading for the stairs.

  I don’t look back, but he’ll watch over me until I’m safely inside.

  ***

  Efficiency #7 is just that—an efficient use of very little space. One room for all purposes. Bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, closet, all in one. A waist-high wall hides the commode, an arrangement that would have appalled me only a year ago. The bedroom lacks an actual bed. Instead, I sleep on a futon which, by day, doubles as my desk. The shower stall is a tiny, rusty metal box adjacent to an equally rusted out metal basin which doubles as the kitchen sink. A microwave and coffee maker sit atop a mini-fridge, the type I had in my freshman dorm room at Yale—all three appliances beat up and scratched like the rest of the furniture I bought at the Salvation Army store with a loan from Vinnie.

  “You couldn’t swing a cat in here,” is what Faith would say if I ever let her see the place. The thought of the grande dame of Palm Beach slumming here makes me smile. When she and my late father, Percy Danforth Locke III, shipped me off to boarding school in the hinterlands of Massachusetts, Faith insisted on paying double for my housing so I could have my own suite. As an only child, I’d been looking forward to having a roommate, someone to stay up late with talking about boys and painting our nails, but Faith’s phobia about my sharing a bathroom with a stranger put the kibosh on that.

  I power up my laptop and, within a second or two, a screed of email messages appears. No question, the internet at The Hurricane’s first-rate—it’s the only thing that is—and, while grateful, I do question why, given almost everything else in the joint is either on its way to decrepitude or already non-functional. The only explanation I’ve ever come up with is that Vinnie likes internet porn a whole lot.

  I change into one of Manny’s old T-shirts, the only thing of his I have left, and flip on the news to combat the deafening silence.

  Another murder in Liberty City, another drug bust in Overtown, another local politician arrested for taking bribes. Just another day in South Florida.

  Unhitching Oscar from my stump, I glance over at a flashing Breaking News banner on the screen. Oscar drops to the floor with a thud and my entire universe pinholes until all I can see is the face of Gretchen Slim—statuesque blonde, former beauty queen, and the last straw that broke my marriage to Manny.

  “Mrs. Slim! Mrs. Slim! Why did your daughter shoot Brandon Sinclair?”

  I stab the remote at the TV to jack up the volume.

  “My daughter Zoe is one-hundred-ten-percent innocent,” Gretchen says, staring straight into the camera, doe-eyed, as a bevy of reporters jostle for real estate below her on the steps of the Broward County Jail. Microphones on long booms poke up at her, camera flashes illuminate the windowless fortress behind.

  “Mrs. Slim, how is Zoe doing? Has bail been set? What was your daughter’s relationship to the victim?” The questions come rapid-fire, but Gretchen doesn’t respond. Just dabs at her eyes with a tissue. She’s wearing
a cream colored, boxy Chanel suit, no doubt a calculated choice to tone down her curves and add a dash of old money and propriety, although she has neither.

  I grab the laptop and Google “Slim” and “murder.”

  “Oh. My. God.”

  More than one hundred search results. Story after story from local and national news outlets. Zoe Slim, the only child of Anton Slim, plastic surgeon to the stars, and his wife Gretchen, a former beauty queen and runner up in the Miss Florida pageant, has been arrested for the brutal killing of Brandon Sinclair, a beloved guidance counselor at St. Paul’s Preparatory School.

  My heart thuds as my husband’s lover declares, “As I have already said, my daughter is innocent.”

  “My daughter had nothing to do with the murder of Mr. Sinclair,” she says, her tone moving up the octave on its way to what, I assume, will be a full-blown crying fit.

  Another question catapults out of the crowd. Gretchen cups her ear and points at a man in the front row. I recognize him as the reporter from the Sun Sentinel assigned to the courthouse beat.

  “Do you keep a gun at home?”

  “I wouldn’t answer that if I were you,” I warned TV Gretchen.

  Gretchen recoils, a manicured hand pressed to her ample chest.

  “A gun? Of course, I don’t have a gun.” she says, before dissolving into tears and wobbling off to a waiting limousine on a sky-high pair of Christian Louboutins, black patent leather with red soles, identical to the pair still sitting on the floor of my closet on Idlewyld Isle.

  I turn off the TV and climb under the covers, my thoughts pinballing between, This is just what I’ve been waiting for, and Only shameless hacks chase cases.

  Then again, Percy, a Navy man, named me Grace, a.k.a. “Amazing Grace” after Grace Hopper, the first female rear admiral in the U.S. Navy. Percy loved to quote her—“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.”

  But, lying in the dark, I wonder how much forgiveness is left out there for me.

  Chapter 3

  I hesitate outside Starbucks, jaw tightening at the distasteful prospect of capitalizing on a mother’s misfortune, even if it is the mother who stole my husband when I was in jail. But with few options and even fewer dollars to my name, not to mention a tenuous grip on my Florida Bar card, I remind myself career-making cases don’t come along every day. And when they do, I’m in no position to let my feelings or law school ethics get in the way. As a prosecutor, the inventory of cases had been self-sustaining, but now I need to hustle which, today, means hustling my soon to be ex-husband and his lover.

  The moment I heave open the door, a blast of arctic air hits me in the face, dousing what little fire was fueling my I-can-do-this pep talk, leaving me chilled to the bone and praying for Manny to be a no-show.

  Inside, the caffeinating of the day is well underway, the ebony jet fuel required to turn the wheels of life spewing from spigots like gargoyles appended to the colossus of an espresso machine. A production line of baristas orchestrates every drink, adding each ingredient in order lest the caffeine gods strike the contraption dead. Heart in my throat, I pick my way through office workers nibbling on scones and talking into phones crooked between neck and ear. I catch a snippet from a gaggle of women in yoga pants about how it’s better to get Botox than leave things be, unless, of course, you bite the bullet and go for the full face lift.

  Not in this lifetime, no matter how much my face or my ass sags.

  But I’ve been under the knife one too many times out of necessity, so maybe I’m not one to judge.

  I look down and groan at the sight of my sweatpants and faded green Army T-shirt. Not a good choice for this land of Barbie mommies and the always stylish City Commissioner Armando Martinez, a.k.a. Manny. I should bolt while I have the chance, but my escape plan is derailed by a waving hand.

  “Grace, over here.” The familiar lilting cubano accent stops me in my tracks, its cadence reminiscent of the rhumba we used to dance and the mojitos we used to drink until the wee hours in Little Havana. The sound, once appealing, now a galling reminder of the man who called when I returned broken from war, and said, “Come on down to Miami, the weather’s fine and there’s lots of crime,” and later, left me to rot in jail.

  I follow the hand to Manny seated at a tiny round table in the back, a manila folder labeled Settlement Agreement in front of him.

  “Good to see you,” he says, pulling me in for a hug, the word “you” coming out as “chu,” the Miami Spanglish accent of his youth as hard to get rid of as a vulture on roadkill. But the thing is, that’s what I liked about him from the day we met in the student union at Columbia—the sharp edges of his less than privileged youth, his utter lack of artifice. With Manny you get what you see, not a curated version like the blue-blooded boys I grew up with in New England. Manny is nothing if not a product of his roots in Havana, the city ninety miles to the south, a paradise frozen in amber at midnight on January 1, 1959, its desiccated buildings and cars still lovingly preserved by those left behind. Like Manny, his parents are people of action, not the kind to await their fate, be it crushing poverty or Che Guevara’s firing squads. They fled with nothing but the proverbial clothes on their backs and their will to make a better life. Like a good immigrant son, Manny took to the education his parents had been denied and coupled it with their work ethic and, later, me. And voilá, instant American Dream.

  Until the dream turned to nightmare.

  I slip into the chair opposite him.

  He runs a hand through his wavy, dark hair dappled with gray now, a development that serves to soften his hawkish features. “Can I get you a coffee?”

  “No.”

  He’s wearing a custom-tailored suit in khaki with a pale blue tie in a double Windsor knot, the dimple perfectly centered. He stirs his usual two packets of sugar into a thimble-sized cup of steaming espresso, a gold Rolex peeking out from under his cuff. “Not quite the café con leche we used to get at Versailles.”

  “Not even close.”

  Spoon suspended mid-air, he says, “You look good, Gracie.”

  “You sound surprised.”

  “On the contrary, looking good was never your problem.”

  “But, being good was another issue, right?”

  He gives me the type of tight smile intended to cover all manner of painful history. “For both of us,” he says, sweeping a couple of crumbs off the table. “But that’s all in the past. It’s time for us both to get on with our lives.” He pats the folder.

  “Fine, but there’s something I need to tell you first.” I take a second to tamp down the anger percolating in my gut and try for a more conciliatory tone so as not to blow my chances. “Actually, something I need to ask you.”

  “I knew it. I knew you had some other reason for coming. I mean, you’ve been dodging me and my attorney for weeks. You didn’t even text me back. I half expected you not to show. Out with it. What do you want?”

  I brace my arms across my chest. “I’m going to defend Zoe Slim.”

  He leans back, tongue in his cheek. “And how do you figure that?”

  “Because you are going to make it happen. You get me the case, and I’ll sign whatever you want, no questions asked.”

  “Like you’ll ever run out of questions.”

  As much as it pains me, I can’t stifle a smile at how well he knows me. “Manny, I’m not kidding. Zoe Slim is big news. It’s the kind of case that will get me back on the radar, the kind of case that can make a career.”

  His clears his throat. “Or, in your case, remake.”

  I slide my chair close to the table. “And it’s the last favor you’ll ever need to do for me.”

  “No offense, Grace. You may have your license back, but I’m not sure you’re—”

  I spring up, spilling his coffee. “I shouldn’t have come. I should have known better than to think you’d help me.”

  “Hey, take it easy. Sit back down.”

  “So
rry,” I say, wiping up the coffee with a napkin as I retake my seat. “All I need is a chance, Manny. I’m trying. I’ve been trying, but I need a break to get me out of the rut of having to take court-appointed cases for indigent clients which pays less than I could make waiting tables. I’m still a damn good lawyer.”

  He turns his palms out. “I’m not saying you’re not a good lawyer, or that you’re not trying, but you and I both know the mega-rich hire only the top echelon, especially when the life of their wrongly accused kid is on the line.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “About what?

  “The wrongly accused part?”

  “It’s hard for you, isn’t it?”

  “What’s hard for me?”

  “Having to represent bad guys.”

  “And girls. And no, not really. I have to do it. For now. And, it turns out I’m pretty good at it.”

  “But what about right and wrong, truth and justice, all that stuff you were so fond of spouting back when you were a prosecutor? I mean it can’t be easy to be on the other side now.”

  “Maybe not, but those ideals are luxuries I can no longer afford. You cut me off remember? For now, I’m doing what I have to, to survive.” I take a deep breath to compose my thoughts. “That’s why I’m here. I have a proposition for you.”

  He puffs out his cheeks. “Grace, I’m not in the deal-making mood. And you’re in no position to bargain.”

  “I’m not?”

  A flash of anger sparks in his eyes, no doubt as bright as the one he just ignited in mine. “No, you’re not.”

  “I’d say that puts us both in the same position.”

  He presses his palms on the table, as if he’s counting to ten to calm himself. “Anger in Armani” is what my friend Rita used to call him when his temper got the better of him.

  “Hear me out. I’m not here to argue. The opposite, actually. You’d be doing us both a favor,” I say, my tone purposefully breezy, unlike the weight of the fear rising in my chest that he’s about to walk out.

  “I’m not sure you’ve got any favors left in the favor bank at this point,” he says, reaching for his briefcase.