Lily White Read Online Free PDF Page B

suggested we could agree to disagree yet still go to Bob and Cathie’s for number 14s, he stared at me, amazed that I could even dream of such a possibility. So I went back to my office and Xeroxed the Sixth Amendment on my letterhead and mailed it to him. Naturally, he didn’t respond. The next time I saw him, at Mr. Big’s, a bar where a lot of cops hang out, I said, “Hey, Sam? That little section of the Constitution of the United States? Did you read it?”
    Sam said: “It made me want to puke.” The words came out lightly, but that’s because there were about twenty people standing around us. What made me want to puke was I knew he meant it.
    Just before Holly Nuñez herself came into view, her heels came clacking down the hall. I had ten seconds left: I could not appeal to Sam’s sense of guilt, since he no longer had one, so I decided to play to his pride. “Fast work doesn’t mean good work,” I told him. “Twenty bucks I’m going to learn on discovery that your investigation went beyond indifferent—all the way to sloppy.”
    “Bullshit,” Sam began, but he caught himself after the “Bull.” Smiling, knowing I’d gotten to him, I gave Holly a warm greeting, even though I could see she’d just spent nearly thirty minutes setting her hair on hot rollers. Her normally stick-straight hair was pumped up and round, like a beach toy. A peach-coloredelectrical cord dangled from her tote bag. Dead giveaways. Two seconds later, I understood: the hair exhibition was to show me she could afford to be arrogant because the prosecution was holding all the marbles. I hate it when lawyers pull this sort of cheap trick, and double-hate it when that lawyer is female; it reinforces the stereotype about women being so devoted to playing games that they can’t be relied on to act as adults.
    “Sorry,” Holly said, trying to sound breathless, although it is conceivable that the malodorous cloud of hair spray hovering about her head was causing breathing distress.
    “No problem,” Sam and I responded in an inadvertent duet.
    Holly’s tiny office was a cube with the lowest ceiling the building code allowed, and with three people in it, you had to work to avoid a panic attack. Plus the place was just plain ugly. Whichever subanthropoidal Republican bureaucrat had chosen the wall color from a paint chip probably thought he was choosing off-white, but the color turned out corpse-yellow. As there were no funds in the county budget to clean the windows, one wall was a rectangular painting of the gray residue of foul weather and pollution. Holly had done her best to liven up the space in predictable Don’t-worry-that-I’ll-cut-your-balls-off-with-a-pinking-shears-because-as-you-can-see-I-am-not-threatening female litigator tradition. She’d hung a couple of framed museum posters—a Cassatt mother and child and a Renoir ballerina—and set an oxblood vase filled with silk delphiniums and hydrangeas on her desk. But the truth was, the only place less inviting than an assistant D.A.’s office was a men’s cell in Building D of the correctional center.
    “What have you got, Holly?” I asked. Sam presented his folder to Holly. Like that of a knight handing over his sword to his liege lady, his action made it clear who was in charge. Since this definitely wasn’t Sam’s modus operandi—he usually held forth as if he were senior partner to any assistant D.A. he was workingwith—I figured there had been a power struggle. The amazing thing was that Holly had won a fight against Sam Franklin that all the big, hairy-chested, street-smart, politically connected assistants routinely lost.
    She opened the folder as if she couldn’t wait to read it. Such damn chipperness: Except for her sparkly dark eyes and her name, however, there was nothing about her to indicate she was Hispanic. Still, I knew the Nuñez was legit because my partner, Chuckie Phalen, had gotten into a fight with her for speaking Spanish. She was in the