Garden of Lies and Thorns of Truth by Eileen Goudge

Author:Eileen Goudge [Goudge, Eileen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6573-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

MAX SLIPPED IN THROUGH the double doors at the back of the courtroom as the clerk was taking jury attendance.

The court was crowded, its long oak benches filled. On the sides people were standing against the paneled walls, and in the back he saw a few jostling to get a better view. Damn those idiot reporters. Max thought. Yesterday, the very first day, the case had made page three of the Post: DEBUTANTE DOCTOR ACCUSED IN TEEN MOM’S TRAGEDY, with a big photo overlay of Alma, lying unconscious surrounded by life-support machines, and alongside it, a cameo shot of her baby. Saucedo v. Rosenthal was being turned into a circus. This crowd made Max think of a school of hyenas, grubbing around the remains of an abandoned carcass.

Soon Rose would be in the spotlight. And she’d have to be good, or the media would tear her to shreds. But what was he getting himself all wrought up for? Rose was good. But then so was Sal Di Fazio, for all his oily histrionics. Max watched him now, pacing back and forth at the front of the courtroom like an overheated actor, beaming at the crowd as if they’d all bought expensive tickets to see him.

Max, peering through the crowd, spotted Rose at the defendant’s table, shuffling through her briefcase. She was wearing a suit he’d never seen before, cobalt blue, with a demure ivory blouse open at the neck, showing the delectable golden-skinned column of her throat. She bent down just then to retrieve a paper that had slipped to the floor, her electric dark curls fanning out, obscuring her face, the pearls he had given her swinging away from her throat, catching the light just so. His heart did a slow ninety-degree turn.

He thought about the call last week from Gary Enfield in Los Angeles. Gary, telling him about Bruce Oldsen’s triple bypass and how it had nudged Bruce into early retirement, then dropping his bomb, asking Max to come and take over the litigation department out there in Century City.

Max, his mind whirling, had told Gary he’d think it over. Which he’d been doing.

Totting up all the reasons it could never work. Balancing those with all the why nots.

Now, gazing at Rose, he thought. How can I leave you? How can I let go of even the part of you I have?

First it had been the separation from Mandy he couldn’t bear to think of. But ironically it was Monkey herself who solved that problem.

“Cool, Dad,” she had said when he broached the subject over a sundae at Rumpelmayer’s. She’d turned her spoon over, and licked off a blob of fudge sauce. “I could really get into spending my vacations out there. Wow! California. Cyndi says the guys out there are really boss. Would we get a house near the beach?”

And so it had been settled. Monkey in tight jeans and Styx sweatshirt, prattling on about boys, reminding Max that in a few more years she would be eighteen, old enough to live where she wanted.

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