Pentangle Ch. 01

"Damn Westlaw, anyway," she muttered under her breath, cursing the legal publisher, realizing she would have to walk all the way back to the law library for the right case book.

For an hour she had sat on a park bench as the sky grew dark, hoping to find the case whose number she had jotted on a napkin at lunch. She should never have accepted that second drink, even if, no, especially because, the man who bought it for her so obviously wanted her. It was he who had teasingly told her about an old case that could make a huge difference in her argument. He'd even told her the Westlaw number, or so she thought. She should never have grabbed the case book without making sure it was the right one.

Not an empty cab in sight at the dinner hour. Not tonight. Everywhere else in Chicago it was Halloween, with kids shivering door-to-door, urged on by parents who thought it was, somehow, their duty to undergo this ritual. Here, downtown, it was just a prematurely cold, miserably cold, October night. The cold crept in under her cashmere trench-coat. The lights blinked on in the buildings along Michigan Avenue. A lone drugstore sold last-minute candy and a few picked-over masks.

A sob caught in her throat. She just couldn't screw this case up.

It was her first chance to take the lead on an important criminal case, and she knew the eyes of every partner and every would-be partner in her firm were on her. As she stood and hoisted the 20-pound volume onto one hip, she saw the man look up from the park bench where he lay, covered from foot to chin with newspaper. He must have heard her choking back her tears.

"I was a lawyer once."

His voice was flat. Deep. Quiet. Not drunk. Not stoned.

Emotionless. She had taken him for just another bum asleep on a park bench, but now she saw that his brow, the curve of his cheekbone beneath the stubble of a week's beard, even his failed attempts to part an unruly mane of (she had to admit it) gorgeous auburn hair, were not those of the homeless. The park's sodium vapor lamps were unsparing, but this man was beautiful. No reddened skin from alcohol and exposure. No runny nose. No perpetually healing scabs from insect bites.

Abruptly, she realized that she had been staring. Not just staring, but appraising. And even with newspaper covering most of him she liked what she saw. And when she saw the incontrovertible evidence of his awakened manhood lifting the middle of the sports section, she knew he liked what he saw, too. Her heart seemed to stop and to race, all at once. This couldn't be happening, she thought. It mustn't happen. I'm engaged. This man is some kind of failed lawyer. This has nothing to do with my future. Now she was perspiring freely under the cashmere and the silk and the wool and the sensible cotton underwear. She tried to turn away, to walk toward the office, but she couldn't move.

"Maybe I can help you," she heard him say gently. It was as if he had thrown a net over her and were reeling her in.

"I really have to get back to the office." Her breath was coming in quiet little gasps. At least it felt that way.

"Because you can't find 'People v Long?'"

"Right. Damn numbering sys...Wait a minute. Who told you what case I was looking for?" Her eyes darted back and forth between the small mountain under the newspaper and his eyes. She could not believe his eyes. In the glare of the park lights, they had become incredibly dark. Like black holes, or at least what she had always imagined black holes looked like. And at the center, they glistened gold. She was falling into those eyes...

"You mutter."

"I what?" She was jerked back into the conversation.

"You mutter. You kept muttering 'People of the State of Illinois v eff-ing Long.' Actually, for the last few minutes you were not just saying effing."

He had the slightest of accents, but she couldn't place it.

"Please, sit. I will tell you all about the case."

"You know it?"

"I should. I was Long's defense attorney."

Those five words put her shockingly rapid, shockingly intense, arousal on immediate hold.

"You've got the wrong case. Robert Long was executed 40 years ago! And that was after 27 years on death row. You're not that old."

"You don't know how old I am."

"I know you're not 90 years old!"

"This is correct."

"Mr. whoever-you-are, this is getting altogether too weird. I've got to get to my office, get the right damn book, then I have a dinner to get to..."

"With your fiancé."

"What!? Oh, right, my ring. Yes, with my fiancé."

"He can't make it. Your cell phone is about to ring. Michael can't make it."

Michael. She was sure she had never even muttered his name. "I don't know who you are. I don't know who you think I am. I know that there are about a million women engaged to someone named Michael and... "

From deep inside her purse, her cell phone began to play Für Elise, the ringtone Michael had installed last night to let her know when he was calling.

The sky was utterly starless. Tiny snowflakes had begun to fall through the lamplight. The stranger sat up, carefully folding the newspapers, saving the sports section for last.

"Are you not going to answer your cell phone?"

Für Elise had stopped.

"It...it's stopped ringing."

"Shouldn't you call him back? He'll worry."

It had never occurred to her that she should call Michael back.

For some instinctive reason it was the last thing she wanted to do. She knew she needed to get back to the office. She knew, too, that somewhere in her gut were the drenched embers of something that had flamed terrifyingly hot and bright only moments before, that had drawn her to this stranger as nothing had ever drawn her in all her 33 years, not once during the failed marriage that had nearly sabotaged her career and forced her to compete with lawyers almost 10 years her junior. Until that moment when he had seemed to read her mind; until she'd been invaded by his unapologetic familiarity with her life.

Now, whatever it was that had burned so hot for him only moments ago had turned cold, leaden. Still, she could not move.

She had never felt so alone or so helpless. The few snowflakes, she realized, had quickened to a real snow. There were even moments when the lights in the distant buildings were obscured.

She could feel it falling on her head and her shoulders. She was glad she had worn her long wool scarf.

"Sit down. Please. Next to me."

Before she could think to say no she was beside him on the park bench.

"You really do not need the eff-ing book. I know this case only too well."

She didn't dare turn to look at him. He frightened her. No, wrong word. Not "frightened." Scared. As in 'Daddy, Mommy, I'm scared!'" She was scared, deeply scared, and she could not move. And she was so, so cold.

"Look at me. Please."

A force that had nothing to do with her will turned her to face him. In the caverns of his eyes, the same golden flames. And once again she ignited. Not gradually, but immediately. From nothing, from scared, from the throes of repulsion, to an attraction too intense to be called attraction. As if she and he were parts of a planet broken apart by an asteroid, falling back together again. Not biology. Not chemistry. Astrophysics.

"You will want to take notes." It wasn't a question.

In the darkness of her purse, along with a slender cylinder of Mace, she saw her notepad and two fountain pens. The Pelikan 800 Michael, who she had barely known at the time, had given her when she was hired by her firm, and the silver Waterman's "eyedropper," ornately decorated, that she had found for him just today at the little pen shop in the narrow alley between two old buildings that were slated for demolition, buildings she thought were empty, buildings she had been sure were deserted because it had been she who had obtained the orders to have every tenant of those dilapidated brick-piles evicted.

The old man who had sold her the pen had said she just might be glad he hadn't complied with the eviction notices as yet. She didn't have the heart to tell him that he would be dragged physically from his shop one day soon, thanks to her efforts.

Instead, she had bought one of the most beautiful and expensive pens in the place. She had called Michael and told him, or, rather, his voice-mail, that she had found The Little Pen Shop of Horrors, because this place reminded her of stories with that theme, stories he had read aloud from his online fountain pen collecting group. (He seemed to spend more time on the computer chatting with fellow fountain pen enthusiasts than he did with her, but she had decided not to be jealous. There were worse distractions.) She'd described the shop in detail, but she hadn't told him about the pen she had found for him there. Solid sterling, the ancient shop's ancient proprietor had said, apologizing for the unusually stiff "manifold" nib and saying that most people like more flexible nibs on old pens. Nor had she told him that the old man had insisted on filling it with ink, to which she had agreed, even though it was a gift for Michael, for sending her this client, for showing such an interest in her career, for seeming to be the last lover in her life of otherwise unrewarding lovers, for asking her to marry him instead of just turning their relationship into one more series of soul-less sexual aerobics sessions.

And yet she was shaking, not with cold but with a longing for this stranger so intense she could barely think, and in the background he still was telling her to take notes.

I'm two women, she thought, the one who wants this man to tear my clothes off and take me, here, now, in the park, with nothing more than my coat for a bed, and the one who wants to win this case more than any I have ever had. This gorgeous man, who was manipulating both women with unimaginable skill. From her purse she pulled her notepad and Michael's pen-to-be, as a sort of bow in the direction of keeping Michael with her even as she puzzled over her temporarily insane attraction for this stranger, reflecting that never in her life had she ever thought of being "taken" except with contempt. No one really talked like that or thought like that or felt like that outside of cheap bodice-rippers. Certainly no self-respecting lawyer. Not this lawyer, anyway. Not until tonight.

"As I said, I was Long's defense counsel. There was no such thing as Legal Aid in Chicago in those days, and Long was indigent and I had only recently established my practice. I told the court that I was happy to take a pro bono case if it would get me noticed, and I knew this one would attract a lot of attention."

There was something amiss about the way he told her this, but she couldn't put her finger on it.

"Long was a vagrant, you might say, although in those days, so soon after the Depression, there were a lot of decent men without jobs or homes who we wouldn't have called homeless.

There were rumblings in Europe, of course, but there were a lot of unemployed men wandering from one job to the next, from one day to the next. Some of them were decent men and some were shiftless derelicts. Some were well on their way from being the former to being the latter. Few made the return trip."

"Men like you," she thought, "men so beautiful we could never imagine them sleeping under newspapers in the park. Men we should be awakened by and loved by in the first light of dawn. How can such men be derelicts? Who the hell are you!"

Again he seemed to read her mind, but somehow this time it didn't feel like an intrusion. "I know it seems strange to hear someone like me calling anyone else a vagrant. By the time I finish what I am about to tell you, you will understand, and you will know better how to defend your client."

"They found Long first, the police did. That is, they found him before they found the body. They arrested him for being drunk.

Red-faced, staggering, belching, falling-down drunk. Soaked with sweat on a snowy, freezing night.

Took him to the precinct house, and threw him in a cell to sleep it off. Right here in the park is where they found him. There has been a lot of construction since then, but there was a fountain just over there, through the bushes. He was walking around in the fountain. Staggering around in the fountain. It was full of snow and frozen slush, of course.

Dead of winter, like now. They took him to the precinct and they locked him up. The desk sergeant's log showed 2:19 AM. I remember like it was yesterday. At 4:05 AM a foot-patrol cop found the girl's body in the bushes, maybe 50 yards from where they arrested Long. She looked even younger than she really was, and she was not yet 20. The cop recognized her immediately as a working girl they had picked up a few times. Her name was Carla but her working name was Cheri. Skimpy little dress up around her armpits, and nothing else. White as the snow. Jet black hair in tight little curls, looked almost like a cap on her head. I saw pictures of her, of course. They took a lot more pictures than they needed to. A lot more than ever made it to the evidence room. If I said 'Lllian Gish' I wouldn't be far off. Perhaps prettier.

She looked as if she had just fallen asleep right there in that stand of trees."

"Right there? Literally there?" At least she had the power to speak, even if she wasn't altogether incisive.

"Right there. And this is what they could not get over: She seemed to be smiling. Dead as a rock, and smiling. At the trial, her mother, who claimed her body, said she hadn't smiled like that in years. Not around her family, anyway. The coroner said that couldn't have been a smile. Rigor mortis sometimes does that, he said."

"What else did they find?" She had stopped taking notes and was gazing at him like a kid at a story-teller.

"Not a thing. No obvious wound. No blood. And I do mean no blood. Not a drop on the ground near her body. None on her body. None in her body. She was completely bloodless. White as the snow. No sign of rape, although given her calling that's not always easy to detect."

"So far, you've got a circumstantial case," she said. "Nothing on her body to connect her to Long. No way, in those days, to do DNA on any fluids he might have left in her. So how did they figure it out?"

"At 4:45 or so, they threw another man in with Long. Another drunk. He kept pestering Long, or so Long told me, and the two got into a fight. He kneed Long in the ba... in the groin, and Long, well, he threw up."

"I still don't follow...Oh my God!"

"By then the detectives at the precinct had heard about the bloodless girl. There's bloodless and bloodless. They could still get a blood type on the girl, and on Long's stomach contents.

They charged Long with murder, abuse of corpse, and a few other things that are irrelevant to your case. By the time I got involved, the story was all over the papers. 'Girl Meets Ghoul.' 'One Sucker Too Many.' Headlines like that. But the stories themselves were sympathetic to Carla. Even in a world where people could get away with saying that a girl had 'asked for it,' they knew she hadn't asked for that. In the end, the jury was out less than an hour. Guilty of everything. They even asked if they could find him guilty of a few things he had not been charged with."

"So why wasn't he practically executed on the spot?"

"Just about everyone would have liked that. Even Long. He just wanted to get it over with, or so he said. This is where my case is relevant to your case. Remember me mentioning Carla's smile?"

"I can almost see it."

"It was not until after the trial that I learned that there were many more photos than the ones that were used as evidence. Photos that just happened to have found their way into the lockers and under the mattresses of the cops and their friends. These were the photos that showed her smile. As well as a lot more, naturally. The photos at the trial never showed her face in such a way that you could tell how much she was smiling. In fact, if her mother had not said something about it I would never have thought anything about it. But I saw those pictures, and that was no rigor mortis. That was the most ecstatic smile I ever saw.

So I appealed on the grounds of the suppressed evidence. Now here is where we get relevant to your case. My claim was that no one who died smiling like she was could have been murdered. She died a consenting adult, as happy as she had ever been in her life.

Vampirism is not, of itself, murder. I managed to keep that appeal going for years, even after Long told me he hated me for failing to free him or let him be executed. In the end, Long was executed, but not for Carla. It was because he had killed a fellow inmate, or so they claimed. With Carla, Long was guilty of involuntary manslaughter at worst. If anything, he'd had a motive to want to keep her alive. Your client's victim appears to have been completely willing as well. Certainly participated without a struggle and peacefully, and, based on the evidence, fully consenting to being a 'fountain of youth' for your client."

She didn't bother to ask how he knew so much about her case.

Her client had daintily sipped from his "victim" for 3 years after videotaping an extensive informed consent. Whether he had known he was HIV positive was something a jury would have to decide. The woman who had been his source of fresh blood, and the beneficiary of his erotic talents had not been aware that he was infected. But she had certainly enjoyed their activity. There was no shortage of videotape to prove it, and no shortage of smiles, not to mention exclamations that would have sounded quite theological if you hadn't seen what was going on.

"Did you represent Long for the prison killing?"

"He represented himself. He did not want to have anything to do with me. He had become quite the jail-house lawyer. I could not be at his trial, but I read the transcript. It looked like suicide. His trial, I mean. He seemed to do everything in his power to get himself convicted. Given his previous conviction, there was no option but the death penalty. At the sentencing, he asked if he could be hanged. The judge granted his wish. They buried him in the prison graveyard. I went to his burial ceremony. None of his fellow inmates came, except for the fellows who dug the hole."

There was silence for a few heartbeats. The snow continued to fall.

"Do you wish to see where they found Carla's body?"

She knew better. What's more, she knew she knew better. She knew this wasn't about Carla's body at all. But the woods, like his eyes, were lovely, dark and deep. She left the law book, covered now with frost, on the bench and slipped her pen and pad into her coat pocket. She picked up her purse, only vaguely thinking about the Mace.

He led the way, his long hair shimmering in front of her in the fading light from the now-distant lamps. They were there in what seemed like just a few steps, yet it might have been another world. The view of, and from, the sidewalk and street, were gone. Something snapped underfoot, and she knew even before she looked that it was a plastic syringe. Great hiding place for a bloodless corpse this would have been.

And some trysting place. She was about to say she had seen enough when...

He turned toward her, and the flames in his eyes nearly blinded her and the heat from his body scorched her. This was the moment, and this was going to be the place, and her hunger for this man was instantly beyond ravenous. He moved so slowly she wanted to scream.

Carefully he swept away the detritus of drugs and covert sex.

Slowly he removed his long woolen overcoat and laid it on the ground. From the waist up he was naked, and sheer sinew, and he seemed to feel the cold not at all. Softly he whispered to her to leave her now-unbuttoned, (but when? how?) coat on and gently he unbuttoned her blouse and helped her out of her neat lawyerly skirt and pantyhose and her very conservative cotton panties that, for whatever reason, were a huge turn-on for Michael. Slowly he lowered her to the ground, his hands on either side of her waist, and as he released her he released the catch on the front of her bra. She expected to be shocked by cold, but his hands and mouth made sure she stayed warm. This was so different from Michael. Michael could be so perfunctory sometimes.