“Good, a couple minutes to spare. Your father’s in the car. Get in there,” he said.
She walked out and hoisted herself into the backseat of the SUV. Dale turned around from the front, looking up. He didn’t smile; his forehead was creased in a new pattern. “Hi, there.”
“Dad,” Evelyn said.
Rudy grabbed the car door and stuck his head in. Evelyn could smell his cinnamon gum. “Where’s Barbara?”
“Is your mom almost ready?” her father asked. He was neatly and subtly dressed, in a navy suit that was hanging off him. His jowls hung loose from his jawbone. He tried to grin a few beats after he had finished the sentence, but he couldn’t quite achieve a full smile.
“She’s not. She says she’s sick. I’m sorry.”
“What’s that?” Rudy said.
“She says she’s sick. My mother. She’s not coming. She says she’s sorry. I’m sorry.”
“She’s sick.” Rudy chomped on his gum so that his lips smacked against one another with each jaw movement. “She’s sick. Okay, so, what, she’s bent over the toilet throwing up?”
Evelyn sat looking at the seat in front of her.
Rudy was working his gum into a saliva-filled lather. “She understands the concept here, right? You show up as an upstanding member of the community, your responsible wife and your pretty daughter at your side, judge is gonna look at you with a little more lenience than if your wife cares enough about you to go ahead and get sick the morning you’re being sentenced for obstruction of justice.”
Her father flipped down the visor mirror so he could see his daughter. “Evelyn, why don’t you see if you can get her down here? Just go up to the room and see—”
Rudy chawed. “Yeah, hon, why don’t you go up there and tell that mother of yours she’d better get down here, oh, five minutes ago? This car is going to leave and she had best be in it.”
Evelyn turned to look at Rudy, spittle clinging to his lips, and then to her father. She took a breath. “Driver, you know where we’re going, don’t you?” The man looked in the rearview mirror and grunted. “Great. We’d better get going. Dad, are you ready? Rudy, if you’re going in this car, I suggest you get in.”
“Listen, sweetheart—” Rudy said.
“Evelyn. That’s my name. Not ‘sweetheart.’ I’m not going back up there, all right? Don’t you think I had this conversation with her already? If you want to go up there and slam the door and plead and cry and make a scene in the Friendship Inn hallway, go ahead. But I won’t do it, and I think we’d better go. It’s better to have his daughter there with him than just you. Right? Rudy?”
“Fuck!” Rudy shouted to the universe, then, a minute later, opened the back door and plopped down next to Evelyn.
The courthouse’s exterior, to its credit, promised nothing. It looked more like a prison than anything, square, drab, from an era of Soviet-inspired cinder-block architecture. Rudy led Evelyn and Dale through the metal detectors and to a courtroom where the benches were already populated, some of the people, obviously reporters, holding notepads. The hearing started right on time, with the prosecutor and Rudy arguing over the sentencing-guideline calculations, then about $9 million in restitution, which was a whole lot more than Evelyn had thought her father would owe. Then the judge asked if Dale had anything to say.
He did. The back of Dale’s neck was stretched long, his head seeming heavy. Then Dale stood up a little straighter. “Judge Nakamura, my respected colleagues in the legal profession, I just wanted to tell you all that I have thought seriously about what I did, and really faced some of my demons here, and I take full responsibility for it. I understand that it was wrong in the eyes of the law, however right I may have thought it was at the time, and however much I thought it helped my clients. I was always working for my clients, and I always believed I was doing right by them. Nevertheless, when the law tells you you’re wrong, you’d better listen.”
He sat, and the judge looked up at the room. The sentencing guidelines in this case were fifteen to twenty-one months, the judge said, and those guidelines were suggested but not mandatory. He had taken into account all of the factors, he said, including Dale Beegan’s strong community support, his family, and his long work record that suggested this was an aberrance in behavior.
Evelyn saw the back of her father’s head nodding. That was good; he always said he could read a judge better than anyone. Please, she thought, trying to send a message to the judge. Please. Probation with no prison time. Please.