Seconds later the doors opened onto a private alcove with a handsome set of double oak doors at one end. I raised my knuckles to knock but a turn of the European-style brass handle beat me.
“Max, how wonderful to see you. Come in, come in,” said Diane McIntyre, swinging open the door and then reaching up on her toes to kiss my cheek.
Billy’s attorney friend, and now fiancée, was radiant. Her hair was a glossy and subtle auburn. She was dressed in a loose silk blouse oddly paired with sky blue sweatpants and was padding around in bare feet with a glass of wine in her hand. There was a smile on her pale but slightly flushed face. She was a happy woman.
Billy was on the other side of the huge single room, behind the kitchen counter, working some new magic at the stove.
“M-Max,” he said, over his shoulder and then broke away from the steaming pot. “Y-You are l-looking healthy.”
We shook hands and then he pulled me to him in an uncharacteristic embrace. “G-Good to see you.”
While he got me a beer I sat on one of the stools at the counter and surveyed. I was familiar with Billy’s penthouse, had lived here my first few weeks in Florida before getting settled into the river shack. I’d come and gone often as Billy slowly pulled me into his cases as his investigator. The big, fan-shaped living area was plush with thick carpeting and wide leather sofas. Billy’s eclectic art collection adorned the textured walls and topped the blond wood tables. But I picked up some new, more colorful additions; a delicate ballerina sculpture, a large painting of a field of flowers. A woman’s touch, I thought, as Diane pulled out the stool next to me, sat and took a sip of wine.
“So Max, let me tell you about our trip to Venice,” she said, smiling and anxious like a little kid who can’t hold an exciting tale any longer. I could see Billy grin and then while he cooked an incredible pan-seared snapper, we both listened, Billy only interrupting when he felt it was safe.
She was halfway through a description of a stroll through the Piazza San Marco when Billy said: “I w-was trying to f-find the similarities with Fort Lauderdale, the Venice of America, b-but just the water in the canals d-didn’t do it.”
Diane gave him a “get real” expression while he winked at me.
Billy is a supremely confident man. He is GQ handsome, athletically built, although I have never seen him do anything physically strenuous short of captaining his forty-two-foot sailboat. He is a brilliant attorney and had proven to me personally that he could manhandle the markets by investing my police disability buyout and making me comfortable if not rich. His only flaw is the stutter that embedded itself during childhood and has remained. On the phone or even from the other room his speech is flawless. But face-to-face he cannot control the staccato that jams his tongue. The stigma kept him out of the courtroom as a trial attorney, but sharpened his abilities to research and absorb through every other method of communication. And it hadn’t seemed to slow him down when it came to beautiful women.
What Billy may have lacked in loquaciousness, Diane McIntyre made up for. The woman could talk. But I was always impressed by the intelligence and lack of bullshit that accompanied her discourse. She eschewed the typical small talk. Rarely gave opinions on something she wasn’t knowledgeable about. And knowing that, you crossed her at your own peril.
Once, while working a stock fraud case for Billy, I’d been in the county courthouse when she was trying an elderly-abuse case. I’d ducked into the gallery seats just as she was ripping the skin off a state administrator in cross-examination. With a controlled passion she laid out damning statistics, entered photos of bedsores on her client, documented the phone logs from the seventy-eight-year-old woman’s daughter showing calls to the administrator and the abuse hotline and recited, without notes, the state’s own rules on oversight of their licensed nursing homes and how they’d broken them. Within minutes everyone in the courtroom, including the judge, was looking at the administrator, who could do little but hang his head. I still remembered her final line: “Would you put your own mother in such a place, Mr. Silas?”
She and Billy had been engaged since last spring. He had fallen hard, and it wasn’t just because she