"Temporary Sanity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Connors Rose)

Chapter 3

The Kydd takes the entire staircase in three strides. I follow as fast as I can. The door to the front office is wide open, a raw northeast wind blowing snow inside, papers flying everywhere. A stack of files on the edge of the Kydd’s desk slides to the floor.

The waiting clients are on their feet, easing a tall, wafer-thin woman into the Kydd’s high-backed leather desk chair. She’s coatless and it’s freezing. Her face is swollen and bruised. Her white blouse is blood-spattered and open in front, the top buttons torn off. Her lower lip bleeds profusely, a dark red stream running down her neck and pooling at her collar.

The men part to let me through, and I see at once that her right arm is broken. It hangs from her shoulder at a tortured angle, the wrist taking a brutal bend. I take off my suit jacket and cover her chest, press my handkerchief against her lips.

“Who did this to you?” My own hands suddenly tremble.

Her eyes meet mine, but she doesn’t answer.

The Kydd reappears with a makeshift ice pack in a kitchen towel and an old blanket from the hallway closet. I replace my saturated handkerchief with the ice pack and cover the thin woman up to her neck with the worn blanket.

“Who did this to you?” I ask again, holding the ice pack away from her mouth so she can answer.

Her eyes dart around the room before she speaks. “My husband,” she whispers finally, “but he didn’t mean it. It was the drink. He didn’t mean it.”

Swell. That’s great. This scenario walked into the DA’s office more than once during the years I worked there. She defends the bastard even before she’s sewn up. By sunset, she remembers falling down a flight of stairs.

“How did you get here?” I ask, pressing the ice to her lips. She points behind me with her good hand, the left one, and I turn to see a skinny teenage girl wearing silver hoop earrings and a faded denim outfit, gnawing a thumbnail. She can’t possibly be old enough to drive-not legally, anyway. I decide not to inquire, the hallmark of a good defense lawyer, Harry says.

“Your father did this?” I ask instead.

The skinny girl gives up her thumbnail reluctantly. “He’s not my father.” She shakes her head. “And he’s not her husband either. She just says that. Like he’s some kind of prize.”

Harry rushes into the front office, Steady Teddy following at a slower, almost leisurely, pace. Steady’s light gray suit, a fine Italian cut, probably cost more than all of Harry’s suits put together. Steady has a narrow build, and he’s about four inches shorter than Harry’s six-foot frame, but he wears enough gold around his neck to stoop a much larger man. He stays behind Harry, adjusting his shiny watch band, looking away from the injured woman in the chair.

Imagine that. Steady Teddy doesn’t want to get involved.

Harry, though, moves to the woman’s side without a word and takes her pulse, one of those skills career criminal defense lawyers master somehow. “She’s not in shock,” he says, his eyes moving from the wall clock to the ice compress on the woman’s bleeding lip. “But she’s got to get to a hospital.”

Harry looks to the Kydd. “I’m due in court in an hour. Can you take her?”

The Kydd’s eyes widen and he gestures helplessly to the two men who’ve been waiting to see him since I got here. Harry’s eyes move to mine, but he doesn’t ask. He knows how anxious I am about tomorrow’s trial.

“I’ll call the rescue squad,” he says.

The woman pushes the kitchen-towel compress away and tries to get out of the chair, but she falls back against it almost at once. “No,” she cries. “No ambulance. No rescue squad. I won’t go with them.”

“She won’t go in an ambulance,” the teenage daughter confirms, her eyes rolling to the ceiling. She shakes her head again and sighs. “Never mind,” she says. “Forget it. I’ll take her.”

The mother sobs now, leaning to one side in the chair, her good arm over her eyes. “He didn’t mean it,” she repeats. “He didn’t. He had too much to drink, that’s all. He loses his temper when he drinks that much. He didn’t mean to hurt anybody. He probably won’t even remember.”

Harry lifts the telephone receiver, but I press my hand over the keypad before he can punch in the numbers. “I’ll take her,” I tell him. “I’ll take her to Cape Cod Hospital. But that’s all, Harry. I can’t do any more than that. You can’t either. Not with Buck’s trial starting tomorrow.”

Harry presses the receiver against the front of his suit jacket, looking like a schoolboy about to pledge allegiance to the flag. “Okay,” he says. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

The Kydd and his two clients struggle to raise the thin woman from the chair without hurting her arm. My suit jacket falls to the floor, but she manages to hold on to the blanket and the ice compress. The men wrap the blanket carefully around her shoulders before guiding her out to the porch, down the front steps, and across the snow-covered lawn toward my ancient Thunderbird.

The daughter follows without a word, her thin denim jacket wide open in the winter wind. She looks back at me from the bottom step and when our eyes meet, it hits me. Something is wrong with this picture.

The young girl brought her bleeding mother to a law office. Not a hospital; not even a doctor’s office. A law office.

Somewhere in the depths of my stomach I register a once familiar tightness. A few seconds pass before I can name it: it’s the onset of dread.

I hurry up the old staircase, grab my parka from the hook at the top, and head back down. I’m almost out the door when Harry catches up to me. “Marty,” he says.

I pause in the doorway. Harry’s rugged features are worried. He feels it too. Something isn’t right here. There’s a reason this skinny teenage girl brought her battered mother to us.

He cups the side of my face in his big hand the way he always does now. “Be careful” is all he says.