Wilde Lake(32)

“Fine,” she says. “My secretary will be in touch with the schedule. I’m really glad you landed on your feet, Fred. It’s nice to see you enthusiastic about a case. How did Rudy’s parents even know to contact you?”

“I didn’t say it was Rudy’s parents who contacted me,” he says.

“Who else would it be?” Lu asks.

He’s determined to have the last word: “By the way, even though I’m not challenging his competency, I am considering a ‘not criminally responsible’ plea.”

“He’ll still do time. He might do it at Patuxent”—Maryland’s facility with a unit for offenders with psychiatric problems—“but he’ll still be inside.”

“True. And in the end, I have to do what he wants to do. Rudy says he’s innocent. That’s good enough for me.”



As soon as Fred leaves, Lu goes to her computer and searches the county property database, then finds a reliable website for current real estate values. Rudy’s parents live on Rain Dream Hill, less than a mile from the Brants. Their house would have been among the earliest Columbia homes—modern then, stodgy now, with the best on the street valued at less than $500,000. The Drysdale house has no mortgage on it, not as of last week, but it’s valued at $375,000, and Google Street View indicates that’s a generous assessment. Another reason to invoke Hicks, then. A good defense will run more than $375,000, much more. Howard & Howard will assemble experts, jury selection coaches. They have a big timeline to play with—a lot can happen in a week. Lu has fingerprints and a witness who picked Rudy out of a lineup. She also has a man who has no history of violence, accused of beating a strange woman. Was she a stranger to him? Obliterating someone’s face is damn personal. They need to lean harder on that. Maybe Mary McNally volunteered somewhere or gave him a ride one day. Heck, she could even be the kind of softie who tried to give a homeless guy some task to do in her house. Lu’s going to lean on Mike and her own staff investigator to do more legwork on the victim.

She feels a surge of adrenaline. Lu has always been competitive. All the Brants are. Her father tried to curb this tendency in her, probably because he found it distinctly unfeminine. But this only made Lu more competitive. Fred wants to go all Montague and Capulet, avenge his honor? She won’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s personal, even if it is for him. She’ll win this case because she’s right, because a nice middle-aged lady walked into her apartment one night, probably still thinking dreamy thoughts about the leading man in The Theory of Everything, only to be strangled and then beaten.

She checks her calendar. She could reschedule her lunch for tomorrow or Wednesday. She calls out to Della, asks if she’s right about having that time free.

“It can work,” Della says, as she walks into Lu’s office and places a phone message slip on her desk. “I’ll make it work. Meanwhile, while you were with Fred, that woman who called the other day, Mrs. Schumann, asked that you call her back.”

“About what?”

“She still insists you would recognize her name.”

Lu doesn’t, not at all. And the number on Della’s pink memo is a California one, 650 something. She remembers that prefix from Gabe’s trips. She will remember that prefix forever. Of course, area codes mean nothing now, just an indication of where you got your first cell phone. She crumples the pink slip into a ball and makes a high, arching shot toward her wastebasket. It hits the rim, but it goes in. Her brother, who deigned to play basketball with her in their driveway on those rare occasions when his friends weren’t around, always told her: It doesn’t have to go in pretty, Lu. It just has to go in.





THE PEOPLE TREE


Columbia turned ten in 1977, the year I turned seven, but its birthday was a much bigger deal than mine, a series of events and concerts and fireworks. My father found what he called the “hoopla” mildly ridiculous, although he was careful not to express this view in public.

“Europe thought our bicentennial was a joke,” he said over dinner. It was spring, the sky was bright well into evening, and I stared longingly at the world beyond our supper table. Most evenings, there were just two of us. AJ, as it happens, was at rehearsal for one of the birthday concerts. “And here we are celebrating the tenth anniversary of an unincorporated town. But it would be impolitic for me not to attend all the festivities.”

“You’re in politics,” I said, confused.

“Exactly.”

I don’t think he minded, really. Much as he disliked celebrations about him, he wanted other people to enjoy themselves. I realized that night that we never had acknowledged my father’s birthday, which fell a week after mine. We never did anything to mark the day—at his insistence. Earlier that week, we had been assigned the task of making “spring tradition” cards—no Easter, no Passover in Columbia schools. I had spent my child hood creating holiday cards and Father’s Day cards, but never a birthday card, not for my father.

“Why don’t you have birthday parties?” I asked.

“It’s a week after yours, and yours is eight days after Christmas. The parties have to stop sometime.”

“But a birthday—everyone deserves a birthday,” I said. “It’s your special day, a day of your own day.” I had a little book that called it just that.