The Jezebel Remedy Read Online Free PDF Page A

a call so he won’t be concerned.” She put on her coat. “I’ll yield to your local knowledge. Where should we go?”
    Walking to her car, she used her BlackBerry to leave a message for Joe, told him the deposition went well and that she was stopping off for a meal on the way home, and then she followed Brooks to Metro!, a restaurant on Campbell Avenue, where they sat at the bend in the L-shaped bar, cater-cornered to each other. Brooks settled on scotch, she informed the barkeep in black pants and a white shirt she’d like a martini with lots of olives. She’d considered her order during the drive, what she’d drink…and what her choice would signal, another hint and cipher in their shadow conversation. She’d renewed her lipstick, but not too much, and checked herself in the rearview mirror.
    She and Brooks talked shop and swapped funny legal stories and commiserated about how difficult and cutthroat their trade had become, and he asked the bartender to bring them a plate of the house sushi. After folding her arms across her chest and glancing at the art deco wall clock, Lisa agreed to another martini and Brooks pushed his glass toward hers and nodded for another drink as well. She debated a cigarette but thought better of it. He mentioned a recent client charged with killing his wife and described how the cops had seized this moron’s computer and discovered hundreds of Google searches for “poison,” “hit man,” “overdose” and, of course, so there’d be no doubt,“how to kill your wife.” The lamebrain had even adopted cats and dogs from the local pound so he could experiment with different poisons and doses, a twist that caused Brooks to breach the boundary between personal and professional and despise his own client.
    She steered the conversation more personal after that, asked him whether he had pets, and he told her he didn’t but wound up reciting all his great childhood purchases from Roses department store and the tiny-print ads in the backs of magazines: sea horses that materialized when a pouch was emptied into water, chameleons, iguanas, fighting fish, hamsters and painted turtles.
    “Remember those turtles?” he said brightly. “They were so cool for a kid. You kept them in a plastic bowl. The bowl came with a raised center island and a flat green plastic tree that notched into the island. You filled the bowl with colored gravel flecks. I always seemed to get red or pink gravel.”
    “Yeah,” she said, “and the turtles would usually somehow escape and you’d find them dead or dying, dry as a bone, smothered in carpet fibers.” She laughed. “They were banned when I was really young, right?”
    “I think so,” Brooks said. “For sure, you don’t see them these days. Haven’t for a long time.”
    The gin was warming her cheeks and neck and bumping everything a tick toward the good, the bar noise and other people welcome, happy, Impressionist background, the give-and-take with Brett Brooks now past chatter about statutes and courtrooms. She rearranged herself on her stool, crossed her legs and slid closer to the bar. She sipped the drink, matter-of-factly ate a toothpicked olive and set the glass down, still a third full, her lips imprinted in red on the rim above the clear alcohol. “Do you smoke?” she asked him.
    “No, never have. Took care of my mom in her last few years. She died of lung cancer. Would light up even when she was on oxygen. Horrible. The experience did away with any chance I might try it.” He shrugged. “But feel free if you’d like.”
    “That’s okay. It’s hit and miss with me.”
    “I didn’t mean to sound so negative.” He smiled and flipped his hands open.
    They ate all the sushi, but she left her drink unfinished. When shesaid she needed to leave, Brooks gestured for the bill, and she objected to him paying, reached in her purse and had her wallet ready before the tab made it to them. The bartender hesitated and diplomatically placed the