Page 57 of Justice & Liberty

Somehow, I doubted it was.

He glanced up at me, then back at a book sitting on his desk. “Please make this quick Miss Abernathy, I’m really quite busy. Did you finish that paperwork?”

I scoffed. That seemed like a good start, to let him knowthis conversation wasn’t going to be quite as simple as stealing from me, legally or otherwise.

He didn’t react to the noise, and I didn’t think it was because he was hard of hearing.

“I read your papers,” I told him. “Or should I say, this complete attempted rip-off?”

He turned a sour look up at me, nose and lips scrunched like he’d been sucking on a lemon.

Is that why it’s called a sour face?

Darn it brain, stop that. No time for distractions.

“I’m sure I have no idea what you’re on about, Miss Abernathy.” In a stilted, affected way, he reached over to a tray on his desk and pulled some papers out, holding them in front of himself and pretending to read.

Pretending, because his eyes didn’t move to scan the words. No, they just sat there, glued to the middle of the pages.

“You’re trying to steal my mother’s business from me.” I tried to keep my tone flat, unaffected, but still, my voice shook. Even though I knew he wasn’t going to succeed, it was a painful thing to think about.

It was his turn to scoff. “Steal, Miss Abernathy? I’m simply trying to recoup my costs.”

“What costs? Writing the will? I have no doubt you charged my mother for that. If not, I’d like proof.”

He scowled at me. “You cannot prove a negative, Miss Abernathy.”

What the hell was with him saying not only my name, but the wrong name, over and over again? Was he well aware he was wrong and just trying to piss me off, like it was a deadname or something? Little did he know, I’d have never been offended by having Mom’s name, and hadn’t specifically chosen not to have it.

“Oh, I think you could. Bank records go back a long way. I’ll just bet it would take about ten seconds to find where Mom paid you in them. You’re just trying to squeeze out extra money for some reason, when you’re not entitled to it. And not a little extra money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars that you’re in no way owed.” If he was going to go out of his way to make me uncomfortable, I was going to return the favor. So I slumped into the chair across from him and threw my feet up on his sturdy wooden desk.

His whole face pinched at the thump of my feet hitting wood, as though I’d hit him, not a mere object. “You have no idea what I’m owed. Probate is an incredibly expensive process, and?—”

“And probate fees are paid out of the estate.” I had no idea if he was right about fees at all, but it wasn’t even the point we were arguing. It was him trying to muddy the waters. “If there were any fees, you’d have them. You wouldn’t be trying to trick me into signing my rights to my mother’s store away.”

“The back owed fees,” he stuttered, but then sort of trailed off. His face transformed in that moment, from an overwhelmed, nervous old family lawyer, into a shark. A man who knew exactly what he had been doing.

Oh, it wasn’t like, possession, or an alternate personality or anything.

No, he was just dropping the act.

“Fine then, don’t sign the papers,” he told me, voice as chilly as the hardwood floors in Mom’s house every winter. “You can write me a check for?—”

“Also no. Anything you were owed, you’ve been paid. I have no doubt at all about that. You’re just trying to access money you couldn’t before. A whole lot of it.” My lack of respect seemed to really be setting him off, so I decided topush it even further. “So tell me, Marty, what’s the problem? Why do you need hundreds of thousands of dollars as fast as possible? Lawyering not pay well anymore?”

He bared his teeth in an honest-to-gods snarl for a second before controlling himself, then shoved back in his chair, breathing deep. “You know so much. Why don’t you tell me?”

“Why don’t you tell me about your visit with Ephraim Collins the day he died?” I asked.

He bared his teeth again. “The daybefore. I was in Iowa City the day he died. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You have an alibi, or you don’t know what I’m talking about, which is it? Besides, what difference does it make which day you visited?” I dropped in the information Parker had given us while planning this charade, just to pull Hayes along. Leading the witness, I thought they called it in court. “After all, you just had to put the antifreeze in his hip flask, and eventually he’d drink it. So much better it took him a day after your meeting, so you could pretend it didn’t have anything to do with you, right?”

“You can’t prove that,” he insisted. “The son of a bitch drank himself into a stupor every single day. It only makes sense if I’d poisoned his flask, he’d have died the day I visited him.”

“But you were too clever for that, Martin,” I said, dropping my feet to the floor and leaning forward, giving him a sly smile. I actually had no idea how he’d managed that, but he seemed proud of it, so I offered him the chance to show off. “Weren’t you?”

One corner of his lips twisted up in a smirk. Too bad smirks wouldn’t count for shit in a court of law. Also, they couldn’t be seen on recorded audio. But Martin? He didn’t let me down. “I brought a bottle of expensive whiskey for myvisit, and left it there on his desk. I knew he’d drink it right away. Probably wouldn’t get back to his disgusting Hawkeye vodka flask until the next day.”

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