Page 4 of Goodbye Girl

Andie was speechless for a moment, then looked at Jack. “Honey, this has to be some kind of violation of my constitutional rights. You’re the lawyer. Say something.”

“Are you Jack Swyteck?” the bouncer asked. “The lawyer who got Mr. Garcia acquitted?”

Enrique Garcia would have spent the rest of his life in federal prison for violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act had it not been for Jack’s trial skills. Jack presumed that was how he’d landed on the invitation list.

“That’s me,” said Jack.

“You’re a VIP. You can come. But not her.”

“Bullshit,” said Andie. “He’s a VIP, but his wife can’t get through the front door?”

“We obviously didn’t know you were FBI when the invitations wentout. No cellphones, no cameras, no recording devices, and absolutely no law enforcement. Those are the rules.”

Rules, rules, rules. Jack was sick of them. “Andie, it’s fine. Let’s just go somewhere on South Beach for dinner.”

“No way. You’re staying. You missed Letterman because I made you late. I’m not going to make you miss Imani, too.”

“The difference is I actually cared who David Letterman is.”

The bouncer laughed. “You’re a funny guy,” he said, but Jack wasn’t joking.

Jack took Andie by the hand and started toward the steps, but she stopped him.

“Go inside, Jack. You can’t insult a client by being a no-show, even if he does belong behind bars.”

“What makes you say he belongs behind bars?”

“You didn’t make the A-list because Mr. Garcia was innocent. But that’s beside the point. Stay and have fun. That’s an order.”

Jack knew better than to argue the matter. He walked her back to the valet, kissed her good night, and headed back to the party. The bouncer gave him a claim check for his surrendered cellphone, and there was one more requirement: a nondisclosure agreement. Basically, once Jack left the premises, the event had never happened. He couldn’t tell anyone he’d been there, much less what he’d seen or heard.

“Standard at Imani’s private events,” the bouncer told him.

The lights dimmed, the band started, and guests cheered just as Jack stepped into the backyard. Colored lights bathed the stage, and Imani made her entrance. It was a younger crowd, and it struck Jack that the twentysomethings seemed lost without their phones. A few were still making kissy lips and taking imaginary selfies. Jack felt out of place—not as out of place as he might have felt with a price tag hanging from his shirt collar, but still the odd duck. He stood off to the side leaning against the trunk of a royal palm tree. A couple of Imani’s songs sounded familiar, but only because they included riffs taken note for note from older hits by Queen and David Bowie, which seemed to be the industry standard for the making of “new” music. The performance lasted forty-five minutes. At the end, she said the strangest thing.

“My name’s Imani, and remember: if you want my early stuff, ‘go pirate’!”

The crowd cheered, and she hurried offstage.

Jack was at a loss. One of the hottest pop stars in the world had just told her fans to steal her own music. Jack was a criminal defense lawyer. He was an expert in discerning motive and explaining why people did the things they did.

He was coming up empty on this one.

Jack was home by eleven, out on the back patio with Andie, deflecting questions about the concert that he couldn’t answer without violating his NDA.

Their house on Key Biscayne had virtually no front yard. The back wasn’t much, either, except that they were on the water, which meant that the entire bay was their backyard. Jack felt lucky to live there. Real estate was priced way beyond his means, but years earlier, before he’d even met Andie, he’d cut a steal of a deal on one of the last remaining Mackle homes, basically a twelve-hundred-square-foot shoebox built right after World War II as affordable housing for returning GIs. Those had to be some of the happiest veterans in the history of warfare.

“Did she sing ‘Truly, Madly’?” asked Andie.

“I’m sure she did,” said Jack.

“It’s her biggest hit. You really don’t know it?”

“Of course I know the song. It’s just that I was singing along so loudly, you know, that I can’t actually swear I heardhersinging it.”

“Uh-huh. I see.”

Jack spotted a seventy-foot yacht cutting through the night, running lights aglow—which wasn’t unusual, except that this one seemed to be heading straight for his dock. He rose and went to the seawall to investigate. The boat stopped less than fifty feet away from him. A man appeared on deck and called to him from the bow.

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