Thorazine Beach Read Free Page B

night we’d be dining out, she’d told me. Restaurant, reservation time, separate cars. There’d been in recent weeks, maybe months, a little…
distance
, for lack of a better word. The trial. A certain…
fatigue
. Not to mention Lynette’s travelling—rather more travelling than usual, of late, rather farther afield. And there were, as Lynette put it, “some things” she’d “heard,” arising out of the Garrison affair and its admittedly embarrassing aftermath. Lynette, I knew, had lost real estate business over it. But still, we had…
    I was halfway through a middlingly enthusiastic blackberry cheesecake when she bit the matter off. I felt the heat of shock on my own face. A half-assed protest. “No, Jack. You don’t understand. I
have
left.” No, Jack, you haven’t “done anything wrong.” No, we couldn’t “talk,” there’d be no “working it out.” The house? “Sold,” she said. “You’ll need to be out by the eighteenth.” But, Lynette, where will you…? “Out of the country,” she said. That and “Martinique” and, more quietly, “I’ve met someone.” Then a sudden reach across the table and, so very, very oddly, she kissed my hand, set it back down, wiped her mouth on a clean napkin. Rose. Left. And that was that.
    That and the twenty K—now nearly gone—she’d dumped into my account a week later from some bank in the Cayman Islands. Was it given out of guilt? I never knew her motivation. But I’d spent all but a bit of the money.
    “Earth to Jack…”
    “Sorry, Eileen.”
    I looked up. She smiled again—this time a warm one, stripped of any sarcastic edge.
    “I’m sorry, Eileen, I was just—”
    “I know where you were, Jack.” That smile again, a softer voice, and sad eyes.
    Then a rather deliberate-looking perk-up. She leaned in. Grinned. “Whatcha got that’s juicy?”
    Eileen liked the divorce case report. Laughed at a couple of lines. (Couldn’t resist, I told her—English major, you know.) “Good enough evidence for trial?” I asked her.
    “Never gonna go to trial,” she said. “Wife just wants her suspicions confirmed. Said she’d take my word for it, didn’t even want to see the evidence. Now what about the insurance thing?”
    I sat back. “You got a sense of humour today, Eileen?”
    “It’s Friday afternoon. Why not?”
    “Then you might appreciate this,” I said, reaching for a parcel I’d brought in with my files, the parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper.
    Eileen gave it a querulous look and a grin. “You open it,” I said. She did, and laughed out loud.
    “My fifteen minutes of boss-annoying lateness,” I said, “was owing to my needing to stop in for the frame.”
    “You know my tastes in art
very
well, Jack Minyard.”
    “EVERYBODY!” she shouted. “Get in here!”
    They did, and a dozen women dressed in everything from smartly tailored suits to Wal-Mart sweats sat on chairs and table-corners or leaned, arms folded, against walls, and listened with smiles and laughs as Eileen told the story.
Weeks
on this investigation. Said the insurance company “just knew” the guy was a fraud artist, though the doctors hadn’t caught him. I’d watched him for weeks, shadowed him as he went for this discovery, that doctor visit, physical therapy. Perfect perfect perfect—a wheelchair every time, helped into the car and out, the aching slowness, all the right moves and grimaces. All the right failures to grimace, too—this was neurological, after all, and there are some things you just don’t feel, if the nerves are gone. The totality of evidence—a rapidly building mound of evidence—pointed in the direction that Dwayne Poteat was legit, the forklift accident had left his bottom half paralyzed, and everything I was gathering was making things
worse
for our case. Sure thing for a big six-digit lump-sum payout, or seven digits in structured settlement. Dwayne’s attorney was going for the lump. But now…the picture was a coup. The