“And I suppose you feel responsible?”
“I thought I had done everything I could do to protect her, but, yes, I can’t shake that feeling. I’m not sure I ever will.”
The waiter came back with the cosmo. Dierdre polished off her first drink and took a swig of the second. “Okay,” she said, when the waiter had gone, “gimme.” She held out a hand.
“Give you what?”
“You want me to subpoena you? Get a search warrant for your house?”
“Dierdre, I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“Gimme the Dattila tape, and we’ll go back to your house and I’ll fuck your brains out.”
“That’s the nicest thing anybody has said to me this year,” Stone said, placing his briefcase on the table and opening it. He handed her a dictator with an earplug and pressed the Play button.
Dierdre listened intently. “I don’t believe this,” she said, giggling. “That’s his voice. I only met him once, but I recognize it.”
“And Herbie can put him in the room, along with Cheech and Gus, and swear he said it.”
She popped open the dictator, emptied the tape into her palm and tucked it into her very impressive cleavage. “Do you want lunch before I fuck you, or shall we get on with it?”
“I’m hungry,” Stone said. He wasn’t up for this, and he didn’t know how he was going to get out of it. As if on cue, the waiter set down two plates of pasta.
“Okay, but be quick about it,” she said, digging in. “I haven’t got the whole afternoon; there’s a deposition at three.”
“Are you that fast these days?”
“I’d love the whole afternoon, but duty calls. What else you working on these days?”
“Well, I had a really juicy divorce case, but it blew up in my face.”
“Anybody I know?”
“How about Bernard Finger, Esquire? I was representing his wife.”
“What fun!” she giggled. “Nice fee, I’ll bet.?
??
“I was doing it on a contingency basis.”
“So, you’re going to get ten percent of half of everything Bernie has? Wow!”
“Thirty percent.”
“You’re shitting me!”
“I shit you not. Only thing is, Bernie took her off to Las Vegas for a weekend and they reconciled. And I had the settlement all worked out.”
“Oh, poor baby,” she said, patting his cheek and sticking her shoeless toe into his crotch.
“I’ll live, I guess. Anyway, it can’t last; she’ll be calling me again as soon as she catches him with some doxie.”
“Speaking of that, hurry up with the pasta, okay? I’m getting wet.” She had already finished hers.
Stone scraped the last of the pasta from his plate. As he was about to rise, a belt buckle appeared beside his table. He looked up and found it cinching the waist of the district attorney, the Old Man himself, so called because he was a man and very old, but it didn’t seem to be slowing him down. He had just been reelected for the umpteenth time.
“Why, hello, Dierdre,” he said.