The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📕

Gucci reached him first.

“No one was injured, officer. The woman just lost a shoe.” She wanted to say more, but the important fact had been disclosed. She smiled and lowered her shades back into place on the bridge of her nose.

“What?”

“Well, I mean after she hit the water thing…”

He left her there constructing the next words and walked across to her friend.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“Not sure, sir. We got here after she plowed over the bench and the hydrant. I was just going to call and report it…”

“Thanks.” Thompson left him in the water and made his way to dry ground north of the carnage, then across the lawn in a wide circle. He noted the woman lying unconscious on the edge of the mud pool.

“Does she need an ambulance? Is she hurt?” he asked Maribeth. “You, huh?” he added.

“No, sir.  She…” Maribeth looked down on Mags, then back at Thompson. “I guess she’s just dazed…or something. She came to help me after, after…” Yes, what? After I went for my phone, lost control, again, and trashed the park? Again?

He bent down, checked Mag’s wide-open eyes, felt for pulse, then tapped on her cheek with his fingertips. “You okay?”

Mags came to life with a gasp.

“Jee-zus Jones! What was that?” She raised herself to a sitting position quickly, as though a spring had released its energy beneath her back, and turned her head in rapid circles looking for, for. For something.

Thompson stood up and called dispatch to send a tow truck and a city crew to the park. Afterward he peered down at Maribeth sitting beside her friend.

“So, how’d you manage this one, Governor Harris?”

“Ha, ha, ha. Very funny. Look, it wasn’t my fault.” She thought quickly. “A dog came out of nowhere, right in front of me. I had to swerve to miss it. I swear.”

“Speeding again, right?”

“No! That’s the truth,” answered the child with her fingers in the cookie jar. Something better. A sudden hurricane force wind behind her. She passed out momentarily, fearing she’d hit and killed the poor animal. A sudden defect in the accelerator cable…or however the apparatus was connected and worked.

“I went for the brake, but somehow missed it and hit the accelerator in…stead?”

As Maribeth tried to lie her way out of this one, Anselm looked on, absently rubbing the tingling in his arms with his fingers.

The governor’s daughter. I like her. I think Marvin might, too. Wonder where the palace is?

The situation was under control, now. With a little nudging, a little direction, the two of them would soon enough cross paths. Anselm took it upon himself to make certain the governor did not do the poor girl in when he found out about “this one” in the meantime.

Amy left the Highgate apartment complex and walked along the sidewalk in the shadows of the towering elms standing on either side of the street. A familiar route through the charming old neighborhood of Capitol Hill, the once-Mecca of society’s elite—Molly Brown and Mattie Silks tended flowers, presidents, and lascivious pursuits here, long before the word suburb was given birth. Craftsman and neo-classic design homes now shared an uneasy mix with multi-story, modern apartment buildings that had begun to crop up in the early 1950s, accelerating in numbers a decade later. Spacious lots with long, sloping lawns slowly gave way to often sterile structures that ate up every inch of buildable space, multiplying the investors’ seed money by many fold.  Highgate and others like it were the exception in the growing jungle of stucco and steel blights. Built in the 1920s according to the more refined and humane tastes of the day, these apartments proudly displayed porched balconies, turrets, exteriors captured by forests of ivy, and windows with thick limestone sills. Gabled roofs were the norm, not a faux decoration, and long entrance walkways bordered by lilac bushes smelled sweet in the spring.

Her route to work each weekday morning took her north, out of the dwindling forest of elegant old homes, to Colfax Avenue. From there west, past the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception on her right, and a block farther, Governor Richard Harris’ office in the State Capitol Building sitting like a golden-crowned monarch, gazing at the front range of the Rockies.     

Harris would soon arrive at the Capitol Building, but not before Amy had long passed it and entered the lion’s den of Sampson and Delilah, Attorneys at Law, with a shield in one hand and a rose in the other. 222 West Colfax Avenue, home to thirteen small law firms, one CPA firm, and one architectural firm specializing in urban renewal projects.

The office at 222 was on the third floor of the Court Building, an elderly, four-story dwarf compared to the younger towers surrounding it, facing south overlooking Civic Center Park. There, a stone’s throw away, verdant expanses of grass, wide, meandering walkways, and, at the far end, the Greek amphitheater provided a quiet, restful atmosphere where Amy often sat on a weather worn stone bench to nibble on her vegetarian lunches and read a book, in preparation for the endless afternoons—the whitewater hours when she would find herself caught helplessly in the furious rush of John Sampson’s indomitable will.

From either of the two attorneys’ offices, the view was spectacular. The park and surrounding public buildings were laid out in warm weather clothing now. Summer would give way to riots of color, chill breezes and the crackle and swirl of falling leaves. Finally winter would descend in a fairytale white, a cloak of ermine and crystal covering everything, with lovers pressed close as one as they walked. Contrast this to the fluorescent lit, Musack dull, stale décor, the smell of an Airwick-office. The Sampson presence overwhelming meek Delilah. Each day of the workweek was a half-purgatory, and the seasons never changed.

John was there when she arrived at seven forty-five. John Sampson, that is. Very early, even for the boss whose pungent greeting the first day of her employment had ended with the words that set the tenor for her future in his office. “You realize, Amy, time is money. I expect you to be on time, on the dot, each morning.”  Pause, leer, and smile crudely. “Your skirt’s too long. Think ‘enticing’. Remember, the majority of my clients are male and wealthy. Reflect their interests in the way you dress yourself each day.”  

Psycho.

Today he stood with a saturnine look on his face at her desk in the reception area between his office and the hallway, holding the small, framed photo of her and Dan Berkshire. Mags had snapped the picture at Lake Mead a year ago when things with him were still…still, meaningful, she remembered. A feeling of resentment at John holding it caused her cheeks to flush.

John glanced across the desk, but made no comment about the photograph. He set it back atop the desk as though the subtle invasion of her effects was his unspoken right. He hadn’t been admiring the image of Dan standing tan and healthy and smiling in the sand, with her perched on his back, arms draped across his shoulders and chest. Laughing at a joke she’d long since forgotten, just uttered by Mags. John Sampson seemed almost to be scowling. Of course he knew nothing of Dan, or how and why the first man she had really loved had gone away. He only knew that whoever this person in the photo was, Amy was close to him. It fired something inside him, that much was apparent; the way his gaze seared the stillness of the air and his lips narrowed into a thin, hard line.

Amy stopped and met his eyes. There was a moment of coldness, as when inquisitor and accused size one another up. When the power of the one bears down on the helplessness of the other. 

“You’re early,” he stated flatly.

“I’m behind in the billings. I thought I’d get a jump on the morning…finish them up first thing.”

He raised his eyebrows, and then changed course, and smiled. “Yes, cash flow.” He turned after an interminably long pause and walked across the room toward his office. At the door he stopped and glanced back at her, letting his eyes travel the length of her.

“Get me the Bauer deposition.” Then he added, “Who’s the guy in the picture?”

She felt naked in that blink of time it took to compose an answer. What kind of question was that, thrown at her in the steel tone of voice he was a master at? She had known Sampson for three years, and knew that he was really asking two quite different questions. Who’s the flake? Are you sleeping with him?

“Just a friend.” Amy set her purse on top of the desk and shot a look at the back of the photo frame, sitting six inches away from where it had been before; the neat piles of paperwork left last evening pushed this way and that. Her desk and her work, not personal property, and yet rifled through outside her presence. “I’ll bring you the deposition.” She left him staring over at her back and crossed around the desk to pull it from the stack of folders.

Good morning.

His light blue eyes, narrow by practice and possessing no warmth, piercing her, she knew without looking at him. She smelled the residue of his aftershave lingering as she flipped through the folders searching for “Bauer” on the tabs. The musky…was it a musky odor? No, too sharp. Too penetrating. Something else, unpleasant. She heard his door latch shut.

I’ve got to get out of here…

“Good morning, Amy!”

The river plunged beyond the cataracts, suddenly calm, wider and peaceful. John Delilah flew through the open door, briefcase in one hand, a shock of daisies and carnations choked in the other. The knot of his tie was terribly wrong; his suit coat hung wrinkled at the sleeves. He jabbed the flowers at Amy with that crooked, friendly smile that always brought her back to the calm, gentler current.

“For you! I…umm, I got them from a vendor down the block. You know, by the parking lot. Down there. Where I park. He had buckets full of them. Here. They’re for you.” 

In her presence, first thing in the mornings, he fumbled for words. Always. He was an inch or two taller than his impeccably groomed partner, an Ichabod Crane set against Brad Pitt. Lanky, nearly emaciated-looking, and the left eye stuck too closely to the beginning of the narrow bridge of his nose. But all of this when coupled with his smile formed a childlike portrait—a scribble of innocence and decency that Amy found disarming at times.

He’d brought her flowers. Not two dozen roses wrapped in a florist’s perfect box with a note in flowing script on an embossed card, “Dinner and drinks tonight?” Only embarrassingly humble white daisies and pink carnations gasping for breath, with a simple exclamation. “For you!” 

For her, with no strings. The difference in the river’s temperament in a matter of yards. 

She let the Bauer file slip down onto the desk again