The Lies that Bind Read Online Free PDF Page B

six—and talking on the phone. The receiver settled like a bird into her big hair nest. From her laugh I knew she was talking to her boyfriend, Stevie, the stereo king, proving that it is possible to do three things at once (eat, drink and talk on the phone), especially when none of them are work.
    â€œHold on a sec,” she said to the phone, swiveling in her chair and laying the receiver down. Watching the earpiece hit the desk, I listened for the bass that accompanies Stevie wherever he goes and keeps him plugged into the source, like those heartbeat machines that mothers play for their newborn babies.
    Anna handed me my mail and messages. Stevie’s faint but unmistakable beat came through the telephone line.
    â€œWhere’s Brink?” I asked, even though I probably already knew.
    â€œOut to lunch.”
    Having done her duty by handing me my mail and messages, Anna picked up the phone and resumed her conversation. I went into my office, closed the door and opened the mail, most of which could wait until next week or next year. Baxter, Johnson, one of my least-favorite law firms, was having a cocktail party to celebrate their move to new offices in the black slab building. It would be catered, of course, with the best nouveau Mex cuisine, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be eating it with Baxter or Johnson. I put the invitation in my purse, flipped through the rest of the mail and came across a brochure for a skunk gun, a vial containing skunk juice that was small enough to fit on a key ring. “Skunk juice,” the brochure said, “has been tested and proven to be the odor that repels men faster than any other.” When a woman is threatened, she breaks open the vial and the skunk smell drives the assailant away. Of course the woman doesn’t smell too great herself, but that’s better than being attacked, and the skunk gun comes with a spray bottle of neutralizer to remove the smell. “The odorant comes from the glands of free-range, one-hundred-percent natural Northern New Mexico skunks,” I read, “skunks that have been killed by ranchers because they are considered pests.” I put that aside to show Anna and moved on to phone messages.
    They were the usual real estate and divorce. Karen LeMond’s husband had split with an eighteen-year-old and left a message on Karen’s answering machine that he wanted out. What an eighteen-year-old woman would see in forty-five-year-old potbellied Tom LeMond was a mystery to me, but a man who doesn’t have the guts to tell his wife he wants a divorce firsthand deserves whatever he gets. I called Karen. She wasn’t home. I left my own message on her machine. “Call me back,” it said.
    The next pink message slip was from Sharon Amaral and incorporated both real estate and divorce. Her husband hadn’t been making his child support payments, she hadn’t been making her mortgage payments, the bank was threatening foreclosure. In newspapers all across the country these days the real estate sections are filled with notices of foreclosure auctions. Foreclosures are at the highest rate since the Depression. There are bottom feeders out there who buy up these properties cheap and wait for better days. Fortunes get made that way out of other people’s misfortunes. There are also close to one million bankruptcy filings a year, and the national debt has reached four trillion dollars, a number too big to comprehend, the twenty-four-wheeler of numbers careening out of control down the highway.
    The nineties are paying for the excesses of the eighties. You see it daily in my business. A lot of the excesses began late one night in 1980 on the floor of the House of Representatives, when Congressman Fernand Saint Germain added a rider to a bill deregulating the savings and loan industry and upping the amount of federal deposit insurance from $40,000 to $100,000. Deregulation handed savings and loan owners and