She didn’t know why she’d volunteered that information. He hadn’t paid up, and they were playing a game of tit-for-tat. She should have waited for him to ask.
“My question, then, is which would you drop?”
“I haven’t decided, really, but I’ve considered dropping the Mary and keeping the Charlotte and the Shawn.”
“An interesting strategy.”
“Like I said, I haven’t decided. So.” She looked up at him. “Your response?”
“I was looking at the cars.”
“Why?”
“Why would you keep Shawn and not Mary?”
“Shawn was my father.”
“Oh.” He said the word so quietly that she almost missed the whisper of it beneath the sound of a plane passing overhead. There seemed to be something like reverence in the whisper.
He swallowed. “I was watching the cars because I recognized the driver of the blue when he passed and we…have a history.”
“What sort of history?”
“Where do you live?”
She furrowed her brow. He was so blunt and the question seemed incredibly personal, but she didn’t think she’d come to any harm by responding. Like he said—he could have asked her something even worse in exchange. “Near the airfield.”
“Hmm.” He nodded slowly and drew in another of those long-suffering breaths. “Your Mr. Blue used to antagonize me when I was a child. Briefly, we attended the same private school. His family has…new money.” He said the word “new” as if it had a funk about it. Normally, she would have found that to be disgustingly pretentious, but she actually shared some of his hostility about the client. She didn’t have to like her clients. She usually didn’t, in fact, but she’d always been able to affect a mostly neutral attitude toward them so she could be fair while doing her job.
“I see,” she said. Mr. Blue—actually, Bill Jordan—was a grade-A schmuck who liked throwing money around to get his way. He was a pushy jerk, and she wanted the case resolved so she wouldn’t have to hear that strident voice of his ever again. But she had to be fair. If he was at fault, she wasn’t going to cushion her notes to insinuate otherwise.
I hate this kind of law practice.
“How fast do you think the cars were going?” she asked.
“Do you live alone?”
She set down her pen and fidgeted with the corner of her notepad page. “Yes.”
“I can only speculate on whether or not the vehicles were traveling at the approximate rate of the speed-limit. I’m not a machine, sweet Mary.”
“Of course not. A guess is fine.”
“Well, t
hen. Blue was racing to make the light, and gold had just made a right on red and was a bit over the line because there was a bicyclist in the lane.”
“Okay, so Mr. Jordan was probably going a bit over the speed limit and the gold car was probably right at it.”
“That would be my guess.”
“In your opinion, did Mr. Jordan have sufficient time and space to steer around the other car?”
“Why do you live alone?”
“Because I appreciate the quiet, and don’t like to share.”
“I don’t believe that.”